The baby chick plays peek-a-boo

So, Valerie has this musical barn toy that she inherited from her cousin, which her cousin inherited from her other cousin. I now know why they were so eager to pass it along, because I have that stupid song in my head all the time. Is it a rule that kids' toys have to make annoying noises? That they can only play obnoxious, made-up songs?

Toy makers, here is a million dollar suggestion for you. Feel free to use it, no credit required. All I ask in return is that you send me one of the first ones off the assembly line. Make a toy that plays REAL MUSIC. Seriously, it can't be all that hard. iPods are so tiny now, you could easily squeeze one inside a toy. You don't even need to include any music, just make it so that parents can upload their own MP3s to it. Then, if my child manages to play whatever songs I used to like to death, I can always upload new ones. My sanity thanks you.

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Readiness for solid foods

Question:
Does the baby show interest in the food you are eating?

Answer:

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What do you call it when...

So, I was driving by Circuit City today, and there were big signs advertising their 50% off store closing sales. I had the following three thoughts in quick succession:

"Wow, 50% off, we could get some really good deals!"

"But we're broke."

"With all of these stores going out of business, there are a lot of good deals to be had right now, but we don't have the money to take advantage of them. This is a terrible time to be unemployed!"

And then I started laughing out loud. Because isn't that the definition of a recession?

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Six Months Old!

Dear Valerie,

You are six months old today! (I really shouldn't start these letters like that anymore, because the honest side of me wants to explain that you actually turned six months old a week ago, but we took a trip to Canada that same day and we were too busy having fun with Grandma and everyone else to write birthday letters. Meanwhile, another part of me doesn't want to waste a whole paragraph of your special monthly letter explaining why it wasn't written EXACTLY on the fifth day of the month. Let's start this over.)

Dear Valerie,

You are six months old, now! This has been an exciting month for you, developmentally. You started sitting up pretty well on your own, in spite of what some videos might lead you to believe. (I actually have a video of you sitting up on your own for over a minute, but how boring is that to watch? Babies falling over are much funnier.) You also discovered your feet, which you play with whenever they are within your reach. Diaper changes are fun, because those bare little piggies are right there in front of you, asking to be grabbed, and you conveniently maneuver yourself into a very good bum-cleaning position as soon as you see your toes.

You're still big for your age, weighing in at 18lbs 3oz (75-90%) and measuring 27 1/4 inches (90-95%) at your six-month check-up. You seem to be right on track developmentally for most milestones, except maybe for mobility. I used to think it was because you were growing so fast that you couldn't move all that weight. But I've seen you roll halfway over, and I've seen you roll the other half of the way over, so I think you're capable of rolling over, you just don't want to. I think you're just generally pretty content with where you are, and don't see the need to go rolling around to change it. That, and I think you figured out that if you roll over, you end up facing the wrong direction, and that's counter-productive if you're trying to get a closer look at someone or something. You much prefer the more direct approach, and will lean forward until you reach what you desire, or topple over in the process.



I don't really mind if you put off rolling over for a little while longer, though. Rolling leads to crawling, and crawling leads to me having to baby-proof a home that currently has electrical cords running all the way across the living room, and fun toys like batteries scattered about on the unvacuumed carpet.

You're becoming an easier baby day by day, and I know I should cherish this brief window while you're old enough to be fun and interactive, but small enough to carry around. I took you with me to New York City for my birthday, and wore you in the wrap all day. You had so much fun looking at all the big buildings, and being told you were beautiful in at least four different languages, and staring at all the shiny Chinese New Year decorations. I loved not having to lug a stroller around all day. But most of all, I loved embarking on an adventure with you. My life, as I knew it, ended the day I had you. But life as I could never have imagined it started that day, too. I get to see the world through your eyes, now, and it's a wonderful, amazing, fun place, where ordinary things are new and exciting, and it's always a good time to burst into song. I've learned to be more patient with life, and not mind so much that I can't really keep to a schedule because there's always diapers to change and a tummy to fill, because any given moment can be worth enjoying together. Sometimes, I will admit, I get frustrated, and wish I could wake up at 8:50 and still get out the door at 9:00 like I used to be able to do, without having to worry about packing a diaper bag. But other days, like the day we spent in NYC together, I remember why Jeremy and I wanted to start a family in the first place. A life worth living is a life worth sharing, and sharing our life with you has made our life richer than ever before. Thank you.

Love,
Mama.

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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?

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.