Abigail can't get enough of Miso Soup when we order it at restaurants. I figure I can probably make it myself, as there appears to be very few ingredients. Doing some searching, I found this recipe, which I liked.

8-inch piece of wakame seaweed
8 ounces tofu
4 cups Hon-Dashi
3 Tablespoons red miso

Soak the wakame in water for 15 minutes; rinse and drain; cut into 1-inch pieces. Cut the tofu into small, bite-sized cubes. Bring the dashi to a boil,then reduce to a simmer; add the wakame and tofu and simmer for 1 minute.

Dip out some of the hot dashi to whisk with the miso, then strain it back into the soup...and remove from the heat before it comes to a boil.

"What is miso? It's a fermented bean paste that actually comes in lots of different kinds, each with its own aroma and flavor, color, and texture, but all are made the same way--smashing boiling soybeans and letting them ferment with wheat, barley, rice, or injected yeasty mold. Then the miso "matures" for months--or even up to 3 years. Red miso is made with barley and is savory and good for winter soups. Rice mold misos are yellow, relatively light and sweet. The third type is made with bean koji and is dark and thick. Miso can last up to a year in the fridge."

Note: Recipe and info from http://www.soupsong.com/sjapan.html

An excellent, non-spicy sauce to top pork tenderloins, chicken, grilled steak or mix with pasta for a mild flavor enhancement. Argentina origin. We discovered it as part of a Let's Dish meal and our 8-month old daughter even loves having it mixed into her baby food!

1/2 C fresh parsley, chopped
2 Tbsp onion or shallots, finely chopped
1 Tbsp garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp thyme, dried
1 tsp basil, dried
1 tsp oregano, dried
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp ground cumin
2 Tbsp white wine vinegar
1/4 C lime juice
1/3 C olive oil

Mix all together. Save chopping time by putting all ingredients in a food processor or blender. Stir/shake before use. Keep refrigerated. Freezes well.

At some point I would like to record all of Abby's major developmental milestones, so I am going to start recalling the ones starting at birth up until 6 months.

Here are a couple of recent videos we got of Abby.



Just playing around....Oops, I guess I made the lion charge too hard at Abby there at the end, knocking her over!



Our first try to get a video of Abby "dancing." Her concept of dancing can be seen in the first couple of seconds of the video clip where she rocks back and forth - when she is sitting up, she bounces. Unfortunately, she noticed the camera (in particular, the camera strap) and came charging for it before we could get a quality clip.

I love the artwork that Abigail gets to participate in at daycare. The Goddard School teachers are pretty creative in the various art projects designed for the kids, which are always related to the weekly themes. A couple of weeks ago, the theme was Transportation. All the younger infants got to "paint" a bus and their own car. The teachers would dip their fingers in paint and allow them to freely apply color to construction cutouts of cars and buses. The babies always have a blast playing with paint (sometimes it's just whipped cream) and all the teachers worry about is keeping the paint out of the babies' mouths.

After the cars were painted, the teachers took a picture of each baby's face and stuck it to the car, showing the babies driving or riding.

The cars and buses ended up as part of a traffic scene created for display just outside of Room 1. These photos are very blurry since I tried to take them while holding a bouncing Abigail, but you get the idea!


Remember earlier this month when Abby helped Ms. Ester paint the school bus project with all the Room 1 infant pictures displayed in the school lobby? I'm guessing she is now an expert at painting transportation vehicles!!

For Allen -

12 C good strong chicken broth
1 large onion, cut into quarters
6 carrots, peeled and cut in large pieces
4 large or 6 small leeks - whites only
1/2 stick of butter (NOT margarine)
pinch of thyme
3 bay leaves
1 C of flour
2 C of milk
6 chicken breasts, cooked, cooled, skin off, and cut into small dice
2 C half-and-half cream

Melt butter in large pot or dutch oven. Add diced veggies, thyme, and bay leaf. Cook over low heat until soft or about 15-20 minutes. Stir often. Add chicken stock and bring to boil. Blend flour and milk in a bowl with wire whisk until smooth, then slowly pour into boiling chicken stock. Stir with whisk until thickened. Reduce heat to a simmer, cover, and cook for 2 hours, stirring with wire whisk frequently to prevent sticking or scorching. Remove from heat. Slowly and carefully pour through a large colander which is over a large bowl. Return strained liquid to pot and add chicken pieces. Simmer slowly. Remove bay leaves from veggies and puree all veggies in a food processor or blender until smooth, then return them to the soup. Heat thoroughly and stir. Add the half-and-half, check for seasoning and add salt and pepper if needed. Serve hot.

With a newly mobile infant, I found myself taking a handful of video clips using my little digital camera - a Canon PowerShot S40. Many times I would rotate the camera when recording the video, as I am apt to do when taking a photograph, so I would end up with a video clip that required head tilting to view. I became determined to find an obscenely intuitive and quick way to rotate these videos (WITHOUT having to pay for applications such as QuickTime Pro) and make them available to post online (here in Blogger or in Google Video).

There was no problem finding SOMETHING online to quickly and easily rotate the videos for free, but trying to post the rotated product became a more time-consuming problem. I'll start by describing what I did to rotate the videos and then delve into the posting issue.

A simple Google search for "rotate video" will return many FREE apps, utilities, and scripts to flip, rotate, crop, and size videos of all formats imaginable. I tried one shareware utility for the Mac OS and two AppleScripts, all of which I found very intuitive (i.e., did not need a tutorial or read someone's how-to write-up).

TransformMovie is the shareware utility that allows you to rotate a movie by dropping the file into the opened application window. Settings can be modified in "Preferences" to indicate degrees of rotation, center of rotation, scale factors, and more. I really liked the drag and drop method of this application. So easy! However, because this is shareware, a donation is requested to unlock all of its features. For a simple movie rotation, the free version works just fine.

The following two AppleScripts were obtained from Mac OS forums, posted by other users and leverage the free QuickTime Player pre-installed with the Mac OS. I do not take credit for them, but highly recommend each for their ease of use:

AppleScript 1: (Rotates the opened video file 90 degrees clockwise; use -90 to rotate counter-clockwise.)

tell application "QuickTime Player"
set m to (get document 1)
rotate m by 90
save self contained m in (choose file name with prompt "save self contained movie")
end tell

AppleScript 2: (A little more user interaction is required. Opens Finder and prompts user to select the video file to rotate 90 degrees. User is then prompted to select direction of rotation - CW or CCW - and a location to save the file.)

set originalMovie to choose file with prompt "Select a movie to rotate:"
display dialog "Rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise?" buttons {"Clockwise", "Counter-Clockwise"}
set turnChoice to button returned of the result
set saveRef to choose file name with prompt "Save a new copy of the movie here:"
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
open originalMovie
tell document 1
if turnChoice = "Clockwise" then
rotate right (the first track whose kind is "video")
else
rotate left (the first track whose kind is "video")
end if
save in saveRef as self contained
end tell
end tell

I copied both of these scripts into Applications->AppleScript->Script Editor and hit "Run". That's it!

Excellent and Hooray! Now, I have several versions of rotated videos, but as soon as I went to post them, they would revert back to their portrait mode. WTF!! I uploaded the videos to Blogger and Google Video; both with the same results. It was getting late and it was time for bed. While at work the next day, I would occasionally ponder what the problem could be. I came to the conclusion that there must be an aspect ratio specification for the uploaded videos in Blogger and GV. Before editing, these videos were in portrait mode - wide and short. After rotation, the videos were skinny and tall. Could Blogger and GV require that all videos be a certain aspect ratio that supports the standard wide and short portrait mode video? Can I modify these settings? What would happen if I changed the height and width of the HTML code for the posted videos? I logged into Blogger, swapped the numbers in the height and width elements so that the height became the width and the width became the height. Nothing. Hmmmmm. Back to work.

When I got home, I investigated the aspect ratio hypothesis and it seemed legitimate, so I looked into more free utilities or manuals on how to change the aspect ratio of an edited video clip. As it turns out, a Plug-In for iMovie I had downloaded awhile back called SimpleRotate could do my video rotation (duh!) AND also EASILY (that's a requirement for me, remember?) allow you to export the video in whichever format and ASPECT RATIO necessary. :) Success!

I disregarded SimpleRotate at first because I am still very new to the Mac and did not - still do not - understand how files get managed in the libraries and projects of the iPhoto and iMovie world. [*shudder*]

This past Thursday - four days after she learned to pull herself up to a stand - we found Abigail crawling for the first time. I was setting up to take a picture of her to make Po-Po's birthday card and was fiddling with the camera when I noticed that she had crawled four steps over to me and was now patting my leg! Today, we were able to obtain video proof that she can crawl. The hard part of trying to get her to crawl on cue is finding the right "bait." Luckily, we've got daddy's watch.

I find it HILARIOUS that she won't crawl that last step.

A friend of mine recently posted a note in Facebook which questioned whether or not getting married and having kids mean that you will lose all your friends, leading to a bleak, lonely life... My response is as follows:

It is possible to lose a few people from your social circle, but friends will change with you or at least accommodate your new situation in life. Getting married means you have chosen to spend and share your life with someone you love - your best friend, I hope. You spend more time with one another, but you still make time for your other friends. When you have kids, you spend more time with your family because by choice you have decided to have and love them above all else, but you still make time for your other friends. Just as you need your friends - particularly your girl friends - to be there for you to help you de-stress after busy weeks at work, you need these same people to help you relax when family demands result in built-up stress.

Believe it or not, since having Abigail, my friends have increased. It makes sense....as your life changes, you start bonding with people in a similar life situation. When you graduate and begin working you start to make friends with your colleagues. When you become a wife, you start connecting with married folks. So, when you have kids, you start connecting with other mothers. And guess what? You DON'T lose your old friends. The ones you still want to hang out with, you just do so. If maintaining their friendship requires you to do FUN activities that do not include the child, either your so-called friends can not accept you and the choice you made to have children OR you were not ready to have the child. In all cases when the latter is true, I strongly believe that the adults need to do everyone (in particular the child) a favor and think twice before getting pregnant.

Oh, lastly, raising kids can not just be you and your husband, unless you are a rare breed that knows instinctively ALL there is to know about parenting. Ever heard of "it takes a village to raise a child?" It's absolutely true. And you'll find that you will leverage all aspects of friendship - their ability to cheer you up and make you laugh, to allow you to let loose and be goofy, to offer you good advice, to help you out in times of need, etc. - and these friends become your support, your people, your village. So, quite frankly, I don't see how it's possible to lose friends when they become so important when you have a family.

Abigail figured out how to pull herself up from a sitting position into a stand using the cats' bunk beds today. She made it look so easy, despite the scream of frustration you can hear at the beginning of this video clip. Abby can be such a drama queen! We were so proud of her today. This video was just one of many, many attempts she made at pulling herself up throughout the day, so it was not just a fluke.

Abigail is very helpful at school, as we are told by her teachers. Whether it's helping the teachers calm a crying baby or helping herself to her teacher's banana, it's all in the name of "helping." Last week, Abby helped Miss Ester create a piece of artwork for display in the front entrance of the school. It was a school bus containing photos of all the babies in her classroom. Abigail helped Miss Ester paint the school bus - giving it its blueish-green graffiti.



Abigail looks like she's getting on the bus in this photograph that the teachers took of her while she was practicing to stand and balance.