Baby-Led Weaning

As Valerie's six-month birthday approached, I did a lot of reading on the subject of introducing solid foods. It was rather an overwhelming undertaking. There are about as many different approaches to feeding as there are different babies. Oddly enough, the more I read, the less overwhelmed I became. It all seemed to blur together into one great, big, educated guess. There are advantages to every theory, but in the end, it all seems to pretty much work. Once the pressure of finding the "perfect" method was off, I relaxed, and stumbled upon a theory that just "clicked".

I always hesitate to discuss my parenting choices on my blog, because the Internet is full of people who don't know how to disagree peacefully. So, before I tell you which feeding method we have chosen and why, I want to let you know that I don't think the method you have chosen is wrong, I don't think you are messing your kids up for life, and I don't think you are a bad parent for choosing to feed your child according to conventional guidelines. Really.

Okay, so here it is: We let Valerie eat real food. We let her feed it to herself. We avoid major allergens and choking hazards and chemical-laden processed foods, but otherwise, we just let her eat normal food, cooked to gummable softness and cut into spears for easy handling. The method is called Baby-Led Weaning, but I like to think of it as "What our great-great-grandmothers did before there were handheld food mills or Gerber". There are a lot of developmental and nutritional advantages to this method, and if you're interested, you can read up on it here or here or here. I'm not here to convince anyone, though. This was all just an elaborate preamble to an adorable video of Valerie eating broccoli.

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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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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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