I noticed today (Jan-25) that our children have changed visibly since we last posted pictures of them. When that happens, it's time to add some new pictures to the chronicle of their childhood.
Darwyn has sprouted curly hair that looks just like mommy's did when she was a baby. (You can't see the curls so much in the picture below. But trust me, they're there!) She has two bottom teeth, with a third [and fourth] one poking through on top. She is close to walking. She can stand unaided for half a minute, she took her first voluntary unaided step toward me today. (It ended with her falling into me for support, which was surely her plan at the start.)
She doesn't speak yet, but she sure does talk a lot. "Da-da-da-da-da!" "Da-dooo! Da-doo!" Very recently she began saying "Da-dee! Da-dee!" She looks at me with pride when she says it, which suggests that she may actually intend to say "daddy". Depending who you ask, she also says "do-dee!" for "doggy" and "boop" for "book". Today she was saying "Bbee" for "baby". She has recently discovered a passion for being read to. Greta says we don't read to her as much as we did to Max at this age -- something we should rectify.
Max has been in preschool since December 2012 and he loves it. I arrived early once to get him and observed him a bit from behind the two-way mirror. He was in his own little world playing with a truck, pushing it all around the place, bumping into children and furniture as if he didn't even know they were there. That's my boy.
He has a new found interest in puzzles. It's absolutely amazing to watch him struggle to connect two pieces the wrong way when the right way is blindingly obvious to me. He's just barely begun to be able to see patterns in things like that.
We watched another BBC Earth documentary tonight, the first time in a while. It was a hit. As before, we need to fast-forward to see the animals. But he sat through a full hour-long show for the first time today (compressed considerably by fast-forwarding the boring parts). He was much more excited this time 'round to see all the animals. He loved the baby animals (seals, polar bears). The hunting scenes were a little upsetting, and we skipped them as best we could.
These photos aren't the best. I just needed something to post. Enjoy the video of Max "helping" Darwyn up into his chair by the scruff of her neck.
More technical notes to myself
Following up on my old notes for converting and compressing video for upload to blogger, I've discovered a much more convenient free program for processing videos: Pazera. It converts movies from Apple's evil, proprietary MOV format to something that can be used by people who do not own iPads, and it can also compress them.
Naturally, after going through all the heartache to compress my videos, I discovered that Blogger's video upload page is malfunctioning once again. Rather than wait for Google to fix it again, I caved and opened a YouTube account for the sole purpose of posting videos to this blog. Of course, YouTube doesn't require videos to be compressed, so all this effort has been in vain. I guess that's my punishment for resisting the rise of YouTube.
Also, Blogger sucks. Google obviously wants to deprecate Blogger. Sooner or later we're going to have to port this blog over to WordPress.
