Day 26 - fArt

• Kids are art factories. Their output at the age of five peaks at about 3 drawings or handicrafts per day. While the quantity is likely to match Warhol the art style is more similar to Kandinsky or even more acurate Klee.
• Something every respectable father should do: Make fart sounds by blowing on your baby's skin (most suitable are belly, leg or arm). First of all baby skin is still in the ideal flabby condition to provide the best acoustic result. The second reason is that they really love it and laugh a lot when you do that. And third (and maybe most important) is that later on when they are five they try to make the same on their mother's skin, which annoys the hell out of them :)
• There is one more reason why eating with children is a really slow procedure: You have to get up every 5th nanosecond to mop up some spilled drink, soup, yoghurt, etc.
  
• This morning Florian got hold of my mobile phone and took a picture of my bum while I was emptying the dish washer. The astonishing thing is that I never really told him how to use the phone camera. Children are really intuitive when dealing with technology. So next time you see a video on youtube of your favourite Chinese you know who has uploaded it :)
• Florian was swimming today with a friend all day, so I could spend time with Matthias alone. We went to a shopping centre in the morning where he watched some fish for quite a while swimming around in a fish tank. He asked me what they were doing, I answered that they are swimming around. Not satisfied, he asked the fish himself: "Fish, what are you doing? Fish what are you doing?! FISH WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!!!".
• Another example that toddlers confuse not answering a question with hard of hearing: Matthias asked me at McDonalds: "When do I eat all?" Since I didn't know what the heck he's talking about I didn't reply. So he repeated the same question with incREASIIINNGGG volume until I replied "tomorrow". That was apparently the correct answer because then he shut up.
  
• In the shopping centre I did some clothes shopping. Something you get really good at when being a parent is shopping under extreme time pressure. It took me about 10 minutes to buy trousers and a shirt (and that's with constant intervention from Matthias): Go into H&M, grab the first two things that look half decent (no time to pick the nicest thing anymore with children), wheel Matthias in his pushchair into the dressing room, while carrying the clothes, change while answering all sorts of philosophical questions, OK it fits, get out, pay.
  
• At a comic/manga store Matthias was pointing somewhere asking me: "Is that an Ogre?" And believe it or not it actually was a Shrek action figure!
  
• Matthias was riding around on his kid car this afternoon. He was constantly asking: "Am I driving too fast?". "Well you do about one yard per hour, so no you're definitely within all known speed limits".
• Lunch: McDonalds, Dinner: Spaghetti