New Clara Pics

In case no one saw the new “tweet”, I am spending a whole new post to tell everyone that we finally got around to put up some new pictures of our new Clara Maus. You’ll find it on Clara’s page under Clara’s Pictures 1.

As we are at it, maybe I can tell you a little bit about Clara. She is such a cute girl! When she sleeps, she is utterly adorable! When she is not but well fed, and otherwise fully content, she also is the sweetest baby we have. We really love her that way.

Unfortunately for us, that is, she has a very strong urge to suck and so she keeps us entertaining her in myriads of ways. I remember Sofia was just the same, (plus she was even more colicky than Clara) and I think we broke our previous strongly held view that pacifiers are evil, after just five and a half weeks. I have the feeling we will not make it this far this time around, judging by how completely incapacitated we are when holding her and having her suck on our pinkie.

Otherwise things work quite fine. Clara is happy in the same Sling/Wrap we took Sofia out and about in, and just like Sofia, Clara does not like riding in the car so much either. Clara started her life with some nice, thin, dark hair. Today we noticed that she suddenly lost half of it – talk about a receding hairline! We are afraid we will have another bald baby for a while Sofia finally had a decent amount of hair at about 1.5 years.

Sofia is adjusting quite fine to our new family addition, at least if we count out all the new misbehavior she is starting to explore, even before Clara was here. Often when Clara cries she wants to comfort here by giving here gentle strokes on her head. The only thing is she still does not understand what gentle really means. For example it does not mean to push your hand in her face, or to squeeze her hand really  really hard…. well how should she know? The real question is – should we have named Clara “Carla”, which is what Sofia calls her. Sofia calls herself “Szia” or “Fia.” She’s really starting to talk more and more, and coming up with all kinds of things we never expected. We really have to watch what we say now!

So, right now my mom is here for two weeks to visit, enjoy playing with Sofia and helping out, while I am back at work. It took Sofia about 30 seconds to warm up to her. Sofia is delighted with her new best friend, her “Oma aus Deutschland” who is always happy to play with her and run around outside with her.

Twitter

Finally I am trying out Twitter, to see if it gets me to write/blog/tweet more often. The hope is that, by not having the (admittedly self-inflicted) pressure of having to have at least one decent picture, and at least one decent paragraph to blog about, I would be more inclined to write about our little family life. After all, its partly to update YOU, the family, and partially to keep a small, digital diary of our life as it sweeps by so fast.

So, bowing to my own pressure, here is a picture comparing Sofia and Clara as they were just a few hours old.

Update: Ups, forgot to mention the Twitter link http://twitter.com/Bruderz and that the most recent post is shown on this blog in the upper right corner, under Tweets.

Nathan Special

I meant to send these to Alice, but because Gmail wants me to select each picture one by one, and I am way to lazy to do this now, I am going to post these here instead. Nathan and Sofia had a fun time at the park, while Alice and Nana prepared  a wonderful dinner with a special and very yummy Greek yogurt desert. While running around in the park, sometimes Nathan and Sofia would play together nicely, and sometimes each would run off in a different direction, disregarding anything I had to say about that. Enjoy Al!

Clara

We are very excited to announce the birth of our second daughter, Clara. Mother and baby are in good health and spirits. Sofia also is excited about her new little sister and is already practicing the meaning of “gentle” strokes.

A fun detail is to compare Sofia and Clara’s birthdates, which are 09/08/07 and 07/08/09 respectively. We also wish a happy third birthday to Mia Jalics (Cousins Laci and Amy’s daughter) and a happy second birthday to Emily Geiser (friends Erica and Matt Geiser’s daughter), who share the same birthday with Clara.

For the number loving folks amongst you here they go:

Name: Clara Gisela Kristi Rauschert

Born at 2:49AM on 07/08/09 in State College, PA

Weight: 6 pounds 9 ½ oz.

Length: 21 inches

Update:  Some pictures are now posted on Clara’s new page.

A Family of three, not much longer

This post is going to be more like a twit.

Some good news is that I have done well on my comprehensive exam. According to Em, I am now APD, which means All But Defense. I am excited about this prospect, but also that I finally will get to try-out all those ideas I have been thinking about these last couple of months.

To celebrate we went out and shot a few pictures of Emily and her baby belly. Probably the last chance we got. We try to prepare Sofia by telling her about the new baby. She is all excited, about babies in general but I guess it will be quite a change for her once she becomes promoted to the new big sister.

Today we went with our baby group to some amusement park, which has a whole lot of “carousels” for little kids. Sofia enjoyed herself a lot. I was surprised how she even loved the pretty fast ones. We had a great time, although Emily did get tired towards the end. Let’s hope for another healthy birth very soon.

Let the videos speak for themselves

Blog posts are pretty scarce right now, as I assume you have noticed. I am busy reaching a significant milestone of my Ph.D. (comprehensive exam), so I have not much time maintaining this blog. Nonetheless, we still shoot videos of Sofia growing up and I am trying out a new webservice to upload and host those videos. I will be posting more links on the Video page -> http://bruderz.wordpress.com/videos/

Here are some direct links to get you started:

Video Link: Spring2009

Video Link: FuerOpa

So proud of

“Buh!”, hope I did not scare anyone. Just wanted to say “hi”, and yes I am still alive. Work has taken over a good junk of it but for now I am back.

There are two reasons I am here tonight, the first one is that I just submitted my second real paper, as usual after the last minute. The second is that in the course of hyper tension, minutes before the deadline, not knowing whether I would get to finish and submit that paper after all, I got an email from Al with one of the cutest pictures of my little darling Maus, Sofia. Although it is Al’s pic, I just cannot resist putting it up right away to share with all of you (who probably got used to looking elsewhere for interesting Jalics blogs that seem to keep spouting out of nowhere).

Anyway, so as soon as Al brings up her new post, I’ll take this one down. Don’t tell here though, pshhhht!