rivka | Entries tagged with video

Having a bad day? Here, have a video of Colin bouncing around in a giraffe costume singing "My Favorite Things."

This video is a thing of beauty.

Colin favors us with "Good Night, Ladies" from The Music Man. Kind of. As always happens, he was singing with much greater continuity and verve before I took the camera out.

(Here is Alex singing, at the same age. Man. Aren't toddlers 100% the best thing ever?)

In about five minutes I have a meeting that I am extremely nervous about.

So I'm posting this fabulous video, via

acceberskoorb's facebook, of a talented ASL signer performing Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains."

You don't need to know sign to think this is cool - I only know a tiny bit. He does a fantastic job of using facial expressions and body language to convey the nuances of the song. And if you're a language geek, you'll want to click on the "more info" section on the side to see a literal translation of the signs matched up against the English lyrics.

I just cried and cried when I watched this video

joedecker posted. Tears streaming down my face.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

At least some of the strength of my emotional reaction may be hormonal, I guess. But I see the love and joy and bliss on these couples' faces in their wedding pictures and know that they are truly married in every way that matters. There is no difference between their marriage and mine... except that there are people out there who want to rip their families apart and destroy their lives in service to some imaginary ideal.

This. Is. Wrong.

Merry Christmas! I'm sitting here waiting for Alex to wake up. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? [Edited to add: and then she woke up, and I finished this later, after presents - about which, more later.]

Look, look, you can see our Christmas pageant!!

Christmas Pageant 2008 from Becky Brooks on Vimeo.

A million thanks to

unodelman for taping and to

acceberskoorb for getting it posted right away. It's quite hard to hear them, although basking in their cuteness is easy enough. Here's the script for reference in case you can't bear to miss a single nuance of my brilliant writing. ;-)

The pageant went beautifully last night. It's amazing how much more quickly everything goes when you're not able to stop the kids and give them directions. But they did great! As anticipated, the doves were pretty much incapable of remembering what to do, but they were so cute that it wasn't a problem. I just feel lucky that none of them cried and refused to go onstage. I'm so very proud of all the kids.

The closing words for the service were Jo's lovely poem about the diversity of animals attending the Nativity. What a perfect match for both our pageant and the principle of Universalism.

Afterward, we herded the kids into the RE rooms to get their costumes off, and

acceberskoorb utterly floored me by presenting me with a gift: a gorgeous picture book with an expanded version of the Friendly Beasts carol. Signed by all the kids. I don't know how she did that without me noticing, but there inside the front cover are all these carefully printed or I-just-learned-cursive-inscripted messages and names. I cried.

Also, each family got a card with a beautiful little pageant ornament: a picture of their kid(s) from dress rehearsal night, cut to ornament size and laminated. Unbelievable. When did she find time to do that?!

It was really a perfect service. It was so lovely.

Yesterday Alex started spontaneously reciting the chalice-lighting words we use in RE, and I grabbed the camera to record it. Today she wanted to make another video of the same thing, adding some singing, so that's what we did. She recites the chalice-lighting words, sings one of the graces we say at home before dinner, and closes with a Rumi verse our church sings as a call to worship. She doesn't understand the words of the Rumi, so her delivery gets a bit... interesting.

I love that she really seems to be absorbing what she learns at church and making it part of her life.

A little Election Eve inspiration:

And a flashback to nine months ago:

We're in the home stretch, folks. Let's do this.

I am so thrilled with our little robot, I can't even begin to tell you. Doesn't she look awesome?

Last night at the church Halloween party she was reluctant to wear her costume or join in the fun, and we wound up leaving shortly after we got there. I was afraid that Halloween would be a dud this year, and after Michael and I had expended so much energy on the costume. But this morning at the nursery school parade she was in fine form. While the kids were marching, she broke out with a stiff-legged walk and sang a few lines of a They Might Be Giants song:

In future times, children will work together
To build a giant cyborg
Robot parade, robot parade
Wave the flags that the robots made
Robot parade, robot parade
Robots obey what the children say

( more pictures and a very short video of a dancing robot )

I feel compelled to pass on this video, for all those who are fans of both Barack Obama and Les Miserables.

mactavish linked to this lovely XKCD comic, and via her comments section I learned that it's a takeoff on a truly beautiful ad for the Discovery Channel:

I can never have too many reminders that the world I live in, while infinitely flawed, is a magnificent place deserving my wonder and awe.

Especially on mega-high-stress days like today.

Via AckB, a little something to lift your spirits this morning.

Watch on YouTube

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

We don't celebrate Easter religiously. The longer I'm a UU, the less Christian I feel - and Michael was never a Christian to begin with. (Before everybody hits "reply" at once I should note that my understanding is that, although spring fertility rituals were probably as common as dirt, the historical evidence for a pagan goddess named Oestre is pretty spotty.)

So, Easter not being our religious holiday, last year we didn't do anything in the bunny/chocolate/egg line either. But this year Michael and I talked it over and agreed that Alex would have an awful lot of fun with it. So we went ahead and appropriated ourselves a holiday. And you know what? She loved it.

Three is a great age for the Easter Bunny. She grasped the whole concept immediately, explaining it all to Dorian in detail after just one short explanation from me. And there was not the slightest hint of skepticism... except for late this morning, when she asked how the Easter Bunny had managed to leave her a note without having hands. But even that was genuine curiosity, not an attempt to find us out.

I took a video of the last part of the egg hunt:

Watch on YouTube

(More photos on my Flickr page, as well.)

I have never really been into YouTube. I don't usually click on links that people put in their LJ posts, and I was never very interested in sitting around browsing through videos. I'm not patient enough. But I'm really starting to realize what a fantastic tool YouTube is for the parent of a curious preschooler. Because they have videos of everything on there.

I first got the idea from

bosssio, whose young son has a whole collection of garbage truck videos favorited on YouTube. That stuck in my mind, and when Alex expressed some interest in hammerhead sharks I dug around and came up with a bunch of short videos for her to watch. (Our favorites: this and this. Fascinating for adults but not for impressionable two-year-olds: this video in which a guy fishing for tarpon gets his catch stolen by a hammerhead.)

Tonight I showed Alex some more photos of the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo. She wanted to see more, so I offered to look for YouTube videos of baby elephants.

Then she joined the topic of elephants to her current favorite fantasy-play subject, and asked me to find a video of an elephant going to the veterinarian. With the beauty of YouTube, it took me about five seconds to find a fascinating, non-gory, six-minute video of a bull elephant undergoing a tusk-ectomy at the Oregon Zoo. We went on to watch a video of elephants swimming in a river at an animal sanctuary, and then branched out to other animals visiting the vet. (I've just bookmarked this video of a random litter of Norwegian kittens at their first vet visit, amd this one of a litter of Rottweiler puppies, to show her tomorrow.)

I know that nothing beats giving a preschooler real experiences in the real world, and that YouTube isn't a substitute for that. And I know that for real information, books are a much better bet. But damn - if I can find a video of an elephant going to the vet? That means that I can find a video of anything. It's so cool to have a means of instantly satisfying her curiosity.

We made cookies tonight, primarily to be presents for Alex's nursery school teachers and my coworkers. I remember thinking that Alex might be old enough to help last Christmas, and having her be totally uninterested. This year, "Shall we make some cookies?" propelled her right out of a bad mood and into a state of high excitement.

I made some brown sugar/walnut cookies (not much to look at, but totally yummy) and some snickerdoodles. Snickerdoodles, rolled in red and green sugar crystals instead of the more traditional cinnamon sugar, are the archetypal Christmas cookie in my family. When I was not much older than Alex, I started being repsonsible for rolling the cookies in the colored sugar before they were baked. Now it's her turn.

Watch on YouTube

To be honest, I felt tired and queasy this evening and would not have picked it for cookie-baking had there been alternatives. (We need to give them out on Friday, and tomorrow night we have Avenue Q tickets.) But baking with Alex was a pleasure all the same. I spent so much happy childhood time baking with my own mother. It feels good to carry on the tradition.

...pictures of Alex playing with the kitchen, plus a video. ( Read more... )

Today was the first day of the season for the Maryland Zoo. It was also ideal zoo-going weather: sunny and in the upper 50s. Because we're members, we got to enter half an hour before the zoo officially opened - which turned out to be a great blessing, because it turns out that the zoo is free this weekend, and half of Baltimore had managed to jam themselves in by the time we left. But the first hour we were there was blissfully uncrowded.

I took a zebra photo that I really like:

(Of course, it's hard to take a bad zebra photo. They ~~were made~~evolved to be photographed.)

Alex was incredibly excited. She gave long narrations about each of the animals - what she thought they were doing, where their families might be, how they related to each other. We took a couple of short movies (46 secs, 1 minute 13 secs) of her narrations; I have embedded them below the cut, along with transcripts. I should note that there's not really much to see - it's all about the audio.
( videos! )
(Also note that this is a Gratuitous Icon Post. Yay, GIPs!)

While Michael and I were finishing up our dinner this evening, Alex did a twirling dance by the Christmas tree. Then she started singing along. And we looked at each other.

"...Is she singing Jingle Bells?!"

Yes. Yes, she was. Who knows where she learned it, but she was. And we got her to do it on video:

Watch on YouTube

Sadly, the image is compressed because we'd shot it in portrait format, and YouTube only displays in landscape. And the end of the clip was cut off when we uploaded it, so you can't really tell that, after she stumbles and recovers herself, she announces, "knock uh over." But the Jingle Bells part - with interpretive dance - comes through loud and clear.

( transcription of the toddlerese )