Wednesday, January 21, 2009
No babies were harmed in the making of this video
I managed to make this video 30 seconds long using the old-fashioned method of making videos 30 seconds long, which is only videotaping for 30 seconds. Still working on the trimming thing. We already have a paid Flickr account, so I'm hesitant to get a paid Picasa account. I was planning on using Flickr to host our videos, but the playback is horrible (at least on my machine), so I think it's going to have to be YouTube. (Here's the link to the Flickr version of the same video. Does it look choppy to anyone else?)
P.S. Valerie can actually sit up on her own for 10 seconds or so. But this video ended up being more fun in the end.
P.P.S. Does my laugh really sound like that?
P.P.P.S. Really?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
New toys aren't all they're cracked up to be
There was a joint birthday party for Jer and I this weekend, and we got a digital video camera as an awesome joint gift. I've been snapping little video clips ever since we got the camera, and I'm loving it. I decided that today was the day to figure out how to upload some of those videos to my blog, so that I can officially join the ranks of annoying mommy bloggers posting videos of their babies doing things that are only cute to them and their moms.
Problem Number One: Our camera has a nifty "feature" that allows you to plug it directly into your USB port - no cables required! Which seems like a nice idea until you remember that a video camera, however small, is still bigger than a normal USB cable. First, I tried to plug it into the desktop, which meant fumbling behind the couch to access the back of the tower. Once I got to the USB ports, the camera wouldn't fit into the small space allotted. In order to make room to plug the camera in, I had to unplug three other things. Unfortunately, two of those things were the keyboard and the mouse, which left me with no means of actually interacting with the computer. Not directly, anyhow. I'm still only a partial geek, so rather than getting excited about an opportunity to hack into my desktop from my laptop, I just decided to upload the videos to my laptop instead. I only had to unplug the power cord to make it fit into the back of my laptop. So far so good. I now have the videos off the camera and onto a computer, time for step two.
Problem Number Two: I read a lot of mommy blogs, and I have decided that 30 seconds is approximately when my patience runs out for cute kid videos, unless something dramatic and exciting is happening. Maybe I'm just easily distracted, but unless something is on fire, "Aw, that's so cute" gets replaced with "How much more of this is there?" after 30 seconds. So, before I upload any videos, I want to be able to crop them to around 30 seconds. Oh, and did I mention that I need to do this on free software that runs on Linux? So now that I have videos on my computer, I have been trying to figure out some way of trimming the length. I would have thought this was a simple request, but Jeremy always tells me that the things I think are simple are actually complicated. All I want to be able to do is pick a point on the video and say "cut out everything before this point" or "cut out everything after this point". I've been trudging through long pages of lots of Linux jargon that I don't understand, installed and uninstalled three different programs, and I've managed to find software that will layer videos on top of each other or next to each other, but nothing wants to let me cut them shorter. Is this really such a difficult request? Maybe the problem is that it's too simple. Open source programmers are too busy doing things that they think are cool, no one has time to do boring things like making video clips shorter. Alternatively, there could be many programs that do what I want, maybe even the ones I just installed, but the capability is lost to me in the forest of features that I don't have the first clue about. It took me ages to figure out how to use the Gimp to do simple things like resize pictures, so the latter is probably much more likely.
I'm pretty fed up with the whole thing right now, so I'm going to drop it and come back to it later. When I figure it out, I'll post some videos. Or, when I give up, I'll post obnoxiously long videos. One or the other.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Figures
The sun was shining, so I decided to hang some baby clothes outside to sun out some stains. Then the sun tucked behind a cloud, and there are currently icicles hanging off the bottoms of the clothes, and snow flurries circling around them. Oh well. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.
P.S. I just noticed that this is my 300th post on this blog. Happy birthday, bloggy! I'm sorry I didn't write something more memorable on this occasion!
P.S. I just noticed that this is my 300th post on this blog. Happy birthday, bloggy! I'm sorry I didn't write something more memorable on this occasion!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Balance
There was a time when this blog had more words than pictures. Then I got a nice camera, then I had a cute baby, and suddenly, words became nothing more than context for pictures. That's life for you. Someday, this blog will probably swing with the pendulum back to talking about life again, rather than simply about baby. Until then, here's another baby tidbit. With pictures.
Whatever inner ear thing it is that makes babies like to be thrown* in the air seems to have developed in Valerie recently. She now loves the bits at the end of lap songs where I bounce her high "over the fence", rather than just loving the general singingness of the whole experience. She likes to arch her back and hang upside down, too. At first I thought it was just an imbalance thing, that she was leaning too far back, then not being able to get back up. But she seems to like it upside down, and resists my attempts to right her until she has jolly well had enough, thank you very much.
In an unrelated note, have you ever noticed how, when you look at someone's face upside down, it kindof looks like there is a second face on their forehead?
*Not literally thrown. Don't get all paranoid and call Child Protective Services on me.
Whatever inner ear thing it is that makes babies like to be thrown* in the air seems to have developed in Valerie recently. She now loves the bits at the end of lap songs where I bounce her high "over the fence", rather than just loving the general singingness of the whole experience. She likes to arch her back and hang upside down, too. At first I thought it was just an imbalance thing, that she was leaning too far back, then not being able to get back up. But she seems to like it upside down, and resists my attempts to right her until she has jolly well had enough, thank you very much.
In an unrelated note, have you ever noticed how, when you look at someone's face upside down, it kindof looks like there is a second face on their forehead?
*Not literally thrown. Don't get all paranoid and call Child Protective Services on me.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Another note for Valerie's baby book
First food: Acrylic
Maybe I shouldn't have let her chew on Dolly's hair quite so much. I found a little blob of red fuzz in her diaper yesterday. It passed through her completely unscathed. In fact, when I was folding the diaper laundry this morning, there was the little blob of red fuzz, washed and dried, and still completely unscathed. Note to self: build apocalyptic bomb shelter out of Dolly's hair.
Maybe I shouldn't have let her chew on Dolly's hair quite so much. I found a little blob of red fuzz in her diaper yesterday. It passed through her completely unscathed. In fact, when I was folding the diaper laundry this morning, there was the little blob of red fuzz, washed and dried, and still completely unscathed. Note to self: build apocalyptic bomb shelter out of Dolly's hair.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Five Months Old!
Dear Valerie,
You are five months old today! A lot of exciting things happened in you life this month. We took a trip to Canada to visit with the Davis relatives, and you seem to be starting to get the hang of long car trips. We celebrated Hanukkah this year, and you really enjoyed Mommy's slightly off-key renditions of the blessings. (The harder the song is to sing, the more you seem to like it. You love "Oh, Holy Night" and I swear it's just because you like to watch me squirm when it gets to the high part.) We celebrated Christmas about four times, and you didn't quite get the present-opening thing, but you really seemed to get the wrapping-paper-eating thing. That is the true meaning of Christmas, right?
That has been your main new trick this month. Putting things into your mouth. You do that thing I used to do where you hold a fistful of blanket and suck your thumb at the same time. It's adorable, and nostalgic, because I remember the feeling of comfort that brought. You still haven't cut any teeth, but you've been carrying on with the same "Now I'm teething, now I'm not" routine. Recently, you've started gnawing on things off to the side of your mouth, and when the thing you're gnawing on is one of my fingers, it sure feels like I can feel the nubs of molars hiding just beneath the surface. I may just be imagining things, though.
You're still growing at an alarming rate. I swear there's no bovine growth hormone in my milk*! I've had to retire all of your 0-3 clothes, and you're in the process of outgrowing many of your 3-6 clothes. Every other time I change you, the outfit I try to put you in doesn't fit anymore. It's a good thing your extended family keeps buying you lots of cute clothes!
You also lost all of your hair this month. It seemed like it happened overnight. One day I looked at you and realized that you no longer had hair. (Except for a little ring around the back of your head like an old man. A very cute old man.) Everyone kept telling me that you would lose that full head of hair that you were born with, but you held onto it for so long, I was starting to think that you might actually keep it. I miss styling your hair into a cute, little faux-hawk. I hope you'll still let me do it when you're bigger and have hair again.
It was very special for me to have all my siblings and their families together in Ottawa for Christmas this year. We went to the candlelight Christmas Eve service together, and it was just like all those Christmas Eves we celebrated when we were kids, but with more spouses and babies. I was holding you in one arm when I lit my candle, and you stared at it as I held it out of your reach, and it dripped wax onto my fingers as I jiggled you into a better position. (My child-self would have been so disappointed in me for not jiggling my candle a little more in order to make a wax finger cover. I'm sure I'll have to keep a close eye on you around candles, too, judging by that awed look in your eyes, and the pyromaniacal genes you no doubt inherited from your father and I.) I was glad we took the time to celebrate the Religious Christmas, because in all the rush of the holiday season, it's easy to miss the point. It's not just about presents, although you got a lot of fantastic presents this year (including an adorable dolly in a blue dress who could very well become one of those toys that gets dragged everywhere until its hair falls out).
It's not just about family, even though family is important, and I'm grateful for all of the quality time we got to spend with family this year. Christmas is about Jesus coming to earth. And I hope I can instill that important lesson in you as you grow up in a culture where the unspoken "true meaning of Christmas" is commercialism and the made-for-TV-movie "true meaning of Christmas" is a watered-down and secularized idea of charity.
Merry Christmas, baby girl, and Happy New Year.
Love,
Mommy.
*The FDA has determined that there is no significant difference between the milk derived from rbST-treated breasts and non-rbST-treated breasts.
Phew!
So, you know how I said I had a pretty relaxing New Year's Eve? Yeah, that was the only time I got to relax this week. Family gathering on New Year's day, work and a dinner gathering on Friday, family trip to see the cousins in Allentown on Saturday, church and another family Christmas gathering on Sunday. Today is my day "off". Sure, I had to work, and I have six loads of laundry to do, and I'm planning on writing Valerie's monthly letter and taking her monthly picture, oh yeah, and I have some brown bananas to make into banana bread, and those steaks in the freezer to cook for dinner, and maybe some potatoes to go with them, and...
Hmmm. That doesn't sound so relaxing after all, does it?
Hmmm. That doesn't sound so relaxing after all, does it?
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Holidays and Whatnots
Well, I disappeared from the internet for a week or so, but I'm sure you didn't notice, because I update this blog so infrequently as it is. It was nice to have a respite from my technological ball-and-chain, even if it does mean that I missed at least one Facebook birth announcement while I was gone. (Congratulations Maryalice!)
We drove to Ottawa for Christmas this year, and I can now say that driving 900 miles round trip with a four-month-old is much, much better than driving the same trip with a two-month-old. In fact, she slept a good portion of the trip, and she seems to be overcoming her fear of the dark, so we might break out the old parental "drive through the night" trick next time around and see how that goes. It was still a long trip (about 9 1/2 hours each way), but it went so much more smoothly than last time, since we are starting to figure out what works for us and what doesn't.
Every time I go to Ottawa, it feels a little less like home, and a little more like Home. It's no longer the place that I live, or the place that I recently lived. It has become The Place I Grew Up. Which is special in its own way, and I'm only a little bit sad to embrace this change. It has that aura of memories now, that aura that used to only belong to the town where my grandparents lived. The scent of occasional familiarity. I've gradually grown away from my Ottawa friends, and although it is nice to catch up when we see each other, I'm beginning to realize that the distance between us will only grow, and I should be grateful for the part they played in my life when we lived nearby, and not try to force that level of intimacy to continue. Somewhere along the line, those friendships will get redefined, and they will become that family that my parents would drop in on every other year or so when we were driving through Pennsylvania. Close, special, but not daily, friends.
It's weird to uproot yourself and plant yourself somewhere else. I had done the uprooting thing before - I've moved all over since I first left Ottawa for college in 1997. But with all of my traveling around, Ottawa was always where my roots were. Then we settled into the Philly suburbs. I joined my local church, and canceled my membership at my Ottawa church. We had a baby. And when Jeremy lost his job, there was a fleeting moment of, "Hey, we aren't tied down, we can move anywhere, we can go back to Ottawa or off to France!" But that moment passed quickly. Because we weren't here for the job. We never were. We're here because we chose to make this place our home.
So, while we were in Ottawa, I made the decision not to try to get together with friends. I didn't want to come home from my trip more tired than I had been when I left. And there are definitely some people that I am very sad that I didn't get to see, but I had a wonderful and surprisingly restful time with my family. And all the grandkids. It was lovely.
While we were in Ottawa, Valerie had her first dose of weather so cold that her nose turned red and I had to bury her deep in my coat to stay warm. She went swimming for the first time, at a salt pool, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. She sortof opened presents, and she chewed on a lot of tissue paper. She posed for a lot of pictures. It was a great trip.
Our New Year's Eve was low-key and restful, too. We had a few friends over, played some games, talked a lot, and Valerie decided to surprise us all by sleeping through the entire party, on her own, in her crib, so that we could be adults for an evening. It was a nice treat. When she woke up, I turned to Jeremy and said, "I can't believe she's been asleep SINCE LAST YEAR!" It's my little New Year's tradition. Other people make resolutions, I allow myself the luxury of making that one, dumb joke five times. Tradition is fun.
My family has a tradition of posing the kids, wearing their Santa hats, in a little row, in order of age. Each year, we could look at last year's picture, and see how much we'd grown. When we got older, my mom kept this up, even though we stopped growing and our hats stopped fitting. Then we started getting married, and I made everyone and their spouses new hats, and the line got a lot longer. Then we started making babies. And this year's line got too long for the living room, and we moved it to the stairs.
Wow, I have a lot more to say than I thought I did when I sat down to write this. I was going to say something short and sweet like, "We're back from Canada, go see our pictures on Flickr." But, then again, I haven't posted SINCE LAST YEAR, so maybe I'm just making up for lost time. (That was number four - I'm saving number five for work tomorrow.)
We drove to Ottawa for Christmas this year, and I can now say that driving 900 miles round trip with a four-month-old is much, much better than driving the same trip with a two-month-old. In fact, she slept a good portion of the trip, and she seems to be overcoming her fear of the dark, so we might break out the old parental "drive through the night" trick next time around and see how that goes. It was still a long trip (about 9 1/2 hours each way), but it went so much more smoothly than last time, since we are starting to figure out what works for us and what doesn't.
Every time I go to Ottawa, it feels a little less like home, and a little more like Home. It's no longer the place that I live, or the place that I recently lived. It has become The Place I Grew Up. Which is special in its own way, and I'm only a little bit sad to embrace this change. It has that aura of memories now, that aura that used to only belong to the town where my grandparents lived. The scent of occasional familiarity. I've gradually grown away from my Ottawa friends, and although it is nice to catch up when we see each other, I'm beginning to realize that the distance between us will only grow, and I should be grateful for the part they played in my life when we lived nearby, and not try to force that level of intimacy to continue. Somewhere along the line, those friendships will get redefined, and they will become that family that my parents would drop in on every other year or so when we were driving through Pennsylvania. Close, special, but not daily, friends.
It's weird to uproot yourself and plant yourself somewhere else. I had done the uprooting thing before - I've moved all over since I first left Ottawa for college in 1997. But with all of my traveling around, Ottawa was always where my roots were. Then we settled into the Philly suburbs. I joined my local church, and canceled my membership at my Ottawa church. We had a baby. And when Jeremy lost his job, there was a fleeting moment of, "Hey, we aren't tied down, we can move anywhere, we can go back to Ottawa or off to France!" But that moment passed quickly. Because we weren't here for the job. We never were. We're here because we chose to make this place our home.
So, while we were in Ottawa, I made the decision not to try to get together with friends. I didn't want to come home from my trip more tired than I had been when I left. And there are definitely some people that I am very sad that I didn't get to see, but I had a wonderful and surprisingly restful time with my family. And all the grandkids. It was lovely.
While we were in Ottawa, Valerie had her first dose of weather so cold that her nose turned red and I had to bury her deep in my coat to stay warm. She went swimming for the first time, at a salt pool, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. She sortof opened presents, and she chewed on a lot of tissue paper. She posed for a lot of pictures. It was a great trip.
Our New Year's Eve was low-key and restful, too. We had a few friends over, played some games, talked a lot, and Valerie decided to surprise us all by sleeping through the entire party, on her own, in her crib, so that we could be adults for an evening. It was a nice treat. When she woke up, I turned to Jeremy and said, "I can't believe she's been asleep SINCE LAST YEAR!" It's my little New Year's tradition. Other people make resolutions, I allow myself the luxury of making that one, dumb joke five times. Tradition is fun.
My family has a tradition of posing the kids, wearing their Santa hats, in a little row, in order of age. Each year, we could look at last year's picture, and see how much we'd grown. When we got older, my mom kept this up, even though we stopped growing and our hats stopped fitting. Then we started getting married, and I made everyone and their spouses new hats, and the line got a lot longer. Then we started making babies. And this year's line got too long for the living room, and we moved it to the stairs.
Wow, I have a lot more to say than I thought I did when I sat down to write this. I was going to say something short and sweet like, "We're back from Canada, go see our pictures on Flickr." But, then again, I haven't posted SINCE LAST YEAR, so maybe I'm just making up for lost time. (That was number four - I'm saving number five for work tomorrow.)
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