I am a chocolate snob.

Buy me any Cadbury's 'chocolates' or most other British brands and I'll be offended. They either don't taste like chocolate at all or they are far too sweet. Disgusting actually. Same with Hershey in the US. Well, that's my personal opinion at least. I am not too keen on Belgian style chocolates either, even though they seem to have a good reputation. Mostly I've been eating Lindt as that is available in most countries. In Holland I loved a box I could get in a supermarket chain (Albert Hein), which contained 'Biologische Bonbons' (organic chocolates) - they were fantastic. Other than that truffles are usually quite good when bought in little chocolate speciality shops.

About a month ago I discovered something new. British out of all things! It's called Hotel Chocolat - and they make wonderful chocolates!!! As much as I hate doing free advertisements, but their stuff is delicious. They work with chocolatiers from all kinds of countries who have their chocolate creations tested by subscribers in a monthly selection. Of course I subscribed: once every month I am now in chocolate heaven!

Yum yum yum.

Yannick is a strange baby. From the very beginning - and I mean from week 1 - he used to make a special sound when he wanted me for comfort or milk. The sound is 'laah' and is pronounced roughly like the French word for milk, 'lait'. So most of the time when he comes out with this, I have a good idea of what to do. It's not always right, but at about 90% of all cases. Quite handy. I have no idea where this came from and I've not heard from anybody else that their baby would do this kind of thing. Sometimes, when he is playing with daddy and I enter the room, his face lights up and he says 'laah' with a smile!

Apart from that, the normal sounds he would make reminded me of the Dutch word for onion, 'ui'. A few times when he was really upset, he made talking sounds while crying. The way they came out it really made me think that he wanted to say 'it's so unfair, why don't you help me, hold me now!!!'. What he actually said was 'ummy, ummy, booboo!' and sounded soooo sweet!

We have reached the time when babies start with first proper speech experiments. Lately we have heard a lot of 'bab' or 'baba'. But this is not related to anything (yet) and just part of playing with sounds. It's so cute to listen to him when he's 'talking', I love it.

A few months back I was actually thinking about joining a baby signing class with Yannick, but somehow I never got round to that. The theory is that babies learn to sign earlier and easier than saying words and that it's a great feeling for them to sign to their parents and being understood. I try to use certain signs that I know (milk, drink, eat) with him, but I'm not sure that he's really picking them up. I've realised that I introduced my own sign for 'give me your hands, so that you can sit or stand' and he is using that every now and then when he wants exactly that. Another thing he does is to gently bump his head against parts of my body to show me that he needs a rest and wants to drink. Maybe we can join a signing class starting next week - just sent off a message to apply.

Oh, yeah, before I forget: tooth number three is out and it looks like number four won't take too long to follow.

Finally, here are the results. First of all, all of the photos presented were of Frank, Yannick and myself. There were no bogus pictures. As a reminder here is the link to the page with all of the photos:

Voting is closed now - thanks to everybody who contributed.

All in all the voters got it right. All of Yannick's pictures have got the highest rankings, then we have all three of Frank's pictures and finally we have mine with the lowest points. Yannick is definitely a mini-Frank but one photo of Frank that I expected to be attributed to Yannick was voted most to look like me!?! Also one photo of me was voted to look like Frank. Very strange indeed, but see for yourself:

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Recently I seem to get a lot of blood vessels breaking in my eye. This was already the second time that I wake up and find a huge red mark on my eye-ball. Apparently it's nothing to worry about but it does look scary, and this photo was taken on the third day after the mark appeared - so it wasn't as red any more as at the beginning:

Now add to this frightening look a huge cold sore on my lower lip and loads of newly growing short hair at my forehead … I felt like Frankenstein's bride.

Recently we had a couple of very clear nights and the full moon could be seen through our 'curtain' (which is really just a large dark bed spread made of cotton, like a bed sheet). On both nights Yannick was fascinated by the big lamp out there when he woke up. The first night he just looked for a little while from where he was. The second night he moved closer to the window to see it better and demanded to sit up (he still needs help with getting into a sitting position). I was just inwardly sighing as it was something like 3 in the morning but helped him as I knew that otherwise he might be disappointed and would take longer to go back to sleep than when happy. Sleep is very important!

OK, so he was sitting there admiring the moon. Then all of a sudden his upper body just went forward, like a pen knife folding up, and stayed there, lying on his legs. I thought this can't be comfortable at all and tried to make him sit up when I noticed that he had actually fallen asleep looking at the moon… I really would have liked to laugh out loud but just chuckled about this as I didn't wanted to frighten him. I moved him back to his sleeping spot on his mattress (we have three lying next to each other on our bedroom floor as we are co-sleeping) which woke him up slightly, but he was almost immediately sleeping again.

Here is a suitable song: We like the moon.