Catching up

Hi all!
We've been quite busy over the last two weeks. We moved out of our cute little apartment at the Institute and are now comfortable our new neighborhood. When I next skype with any of you I'll take you on a tour. But it is quite large with a circular floor plan downstairs, Tara loves to ride her Puky around when there is not great weather. Upstairs is an open hall with three bedrooms and a bathroom. We have a tub now, but you have to sit down to shower as the hose is quite short :)
The neighbors are great, there are two moms that stay at home with their youngest, so we have some company during the day. All the kids are out playing all afternoon evening in the parking lot that is designated as a playplace. There is a sign that means that no cars can drive faster than a person can walk. What a wonderful concept!
We bought bikes a few days ago and have now been out on two rides. The first of which was up to a tower in the forest. The forest was pretty and dense, so I have no idea what you might have been looking for at the top, maybe there were less trees when it was built??? Anyway, a nice path to walk. I gave up even pushing Tara up the VERY steep street about 1/2 way up. I was slipping backwards, so Nate came back for us. Then we walked up a path to the tower. We then biked VERY slowly down the VERY steep hill, and circled back in the next closest valley where 'we' biked up again. Nate actually managed to bike up part of the way, but the second hill was even steeper than the first, so Nate pushed my bike with Tara on it and I pushed his. We came to a forest path that had very little change in elevation and we biked along the hilltop, then quite by accident we realized that we were back where we started on the first hill :) We decided to go downtown and eat at that point. Here are the paths we were on: http://www.berggesellschaft-forsthaus.de/

The second days biking we headed out toward the river and downtown, we found a great park for Tara to play in and then came home. Down the hill to downtown, flat along the river and up, up, up to home :) Quite a nice ride. Tara was having fun pointing out cars, trucks and backhoes (der bagger, ba-ba). She fell asleep just as we turned onto our street, so I stopped and took her in and Nate came back for the bike.
Tara is starting to use german words. Her favorite is tschuss = bye-bye (pronounced like a mixture of choose and juice) and bitte = thanks, her pronouciation is biba, as well as der Bagger = backhoe, of which there are two per every city block, so we get ample chances to say ba-ba. She says these with a huge smile on her face. She is also getting danke = thank you, but only when prompted. Her favorite animal sound right now is for horse, neigh, but she says it flatly and it sounds like how you'd say no in german, nay nay.
What else is happening in our lives, hmmm, our neighbor with a 6 month old was watching me sign to Tara, which I still do a lot because her sounds for most words sound the same (Ba-ba is more, der Bagger, backpack. Da-dee is daddy, doggie, there or any word she does not know... the list goes on) So she asked if I thought that it delayed speech, so I gave her the lecture and now she is starting to sign to Jonas!!!

Back to our ever running questions about Germans and Germany. Why have Europeans in general not taken to fixing animals? All the dogs here have free hanging balls, and there are cats aplenty around every neighborhood.
Then we come to street signs, Does the woman walking the child and a bike mean that you should ride your bike on the sidewalk? It there is a bike picture and the word frei (free) below it, does this mean you should not ride your bike here? I've been looking for a children's book with street signs, but I have not found one. It is quite fun to make up our own meanings though, I just hope we have not offended anyone too badly :)

And now on to my thank-you's:
Before we left all of our mommy friends packed up a care package for us. This has been instrumental in Tara's happiness in our travels and settling in. She loves her handmade backpack, she carries it everywhere, especially out shopping, she likes to help! The drawing books are amazing. One pretty piece of paper around many blank pages and then sewn down the seam, ingenious, simple, pretty. One we just use, one I take out on special occasions, like the train to Jena from Berlin, or our first day in a new house, so maybe in a year we will see her progression. Her KU bear is in her words, a "baby" who loves to go on walks with us as well as bounce down the stairs which is when she screams BABY- BABY DOW, and we run after it then walk back up the stairs and repeat. Well those are but a few, I'm sure I'll mention more later, but I'd like to thank all of you for your thoughtful help.
Talk to you all soon,
Love from Jena (pronounced Yeah-nah, in case you were wondering)