Erik's Blog

Last month, I was asked to participate, as a native English speaker, in a videocast from the local language school, Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Laredo, about English pronunciation. The man who filmed me and is the brain of the whole videocast, Rodolfo, is really annoyed at his students’ (and, in general, all Spaniards’) lack of care when pronouncing English words. Rather uniquely, Rodolfo has specifically chosen American English as his pronunciation goal; he has worked really hard, and his pronunciation is superb. This is the third installment in his videocast. Here are the first and second.
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Sometime in the past few weeks, Nora has left her “I must put everything I can touch into my mouth!” phase, and is now often content to hold objects in her hands, passing them from one hand to the other. This shift has coincided, unfortunately, with the introduction of self feeding, whereby she is given a small piece of cookie to pick up and eat. The first few times, she didn’t understand what the cookie was for at all, and she picked it up and dropped it, picked it up and dropped it, just like she does with most things. Eventually she figured out that it was for eating and put it in her mouth…but she didn’t understand that she needed to let go of the cookie once it was in her mouth, so she was just sucking on it with it pinched between her fingers. We’ll keep working with her on this.
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The other day, I put Nora in her little red chair. She was playing with an empty bag of wet wipes. Garbage, it turns out, makes the best toys. She loves playing with an empty plastic bottle. Anyway, where was I… Oh, right. She dropped it and it went a few feet in front of her, so she stood up!!! I was caught off guard, but was able to put my hand on her belly to stop her forward momentum, and she stood there for a few seconds.

What you’re about to see is a reenactment of the event.
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Yesterday, I was informed that Nora was expected to be at daycare at 9:00 this morning, dressed all in white, and with moisturizing cream applied to her face so that her face could be painted and she could be dressed as a snowball and paraded around the streets of town. It’s the annual Carnival parade, the time of year when Spanish kids, who have never had the Halloween costume tradition that American kids enjoy, get to dress up as various adorable things and parade around looking cute. Since I’m always a good sport about trying out traditions of my adopted country, I was there at 9:05 sharp with Nora dressed all in white, and my camera and video camera with empty memory cards and full batteries.
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I’ve been playing around lately in After Effects, which is more or less “Photoshop for Video”. After Apple’s dumbing down of iMovie (Apple dumbed something down? Imagine that!) last year, it’s refreshing to get back to editing videos with an actual timeline and keyframes.

Our little primate specimen decided that everyone should be up and active at 7:30 AM every day this week, so I’ve seen every sunrise so far. Monday’s was beautiful, but I just enjoyed it without recording it. On Tuesday, I actually got out the camera and recorded the area of the horizon where the sun appears. And on Wednesday and today the sky was gray and boring for the sunrise.
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My guitar playing has dropped off significantly in the past year or two, downgraded from “enough to not forget any songs” to “enough to barely keep finger calluses”. Occasionally when Nora is upset about something or generally demanding to be entertained, I’ll pull out the ol’ six-string and strum a bit for her. To her, I think the guitar is a big sound-making box that amuses her for no more than ten minutes. Last night, I played a bit for her and let her touch the strings. I think she enjoyed how the strummed strings felt on her hand.
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Nora, for these first ten months, you have always been sort of lazy, choosing the path that involves the least amount of work. When it was time for you to breast feed, you opted to have the milk extracted for you and, first syringed drop by drop into your mouth, and eventually placed in a bottle. At the moment you’re at least a month behind your contemporaries (our friends’ early 2009 babies) in the area of locomotion. It probably hasn’t helped your progress that you have never liked being on your stomach. Especially ever since you learned to roll over, we barely even have time to snap back-fastening your pajamas closed sometimes.

In my search to rationalize your shortcomings, I’ve come up with a theory:
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The old favorite game of Blanket Face continues to be a success. It’s particularly more fun now that Nora knows how to remove the blanket or other cloth item from her face herself. The sheer relief of being able to see and breathe again delights her to no end.

Yes, this seems to have turned into a video blog lately. This is mainly because a certain someone won’t let me leave her alone for more than two seconds in the mornings these days. Oh well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 24 frames-per-second video should be plenty, right?
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Just like she’s particularly sweet after her breakfast in the morning, Nora’s pretty cute after her dinner in the evening and before bed. Her sleepiness gives her a drunken wildness that’s very funny. This video was recorded on January 5, 2010. [Have you noticed how hard it is not to hit that zero key twice in a row when typing the year?] The pair of green pajamas you see here, which I call her Space Monkey Suit, has now been retired, as it is now too small and she’s worn a hole in one heel from kicking the floor so much.
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Right after breakfast, Nora is most attentive and generally content with life. So I decided to interview her one morning. She’s not a big talker. Frankly, I don’t think even Jack Bauer could get any information out of her. But she does exhibit her two latest tricks in this video. The first is the tongue clicking, which we jokingly refer to as “calling a donkey”. The second is shaking her head from side to side, as if to say “No”. The latter ability is endless fun for the adults around her, who can pose all sorts of yes/no questions, to which she will surely answer in the negative, as she does not yet know how to nod.
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