Thursday, January 25, 2007

Who knew TV could be so great?


For Christmas this year, I made a video compilation of photos from Connor's first 16 months. It's a project I hope to repeat each year, not only because it took me a while to learn to use the software, but it's sort of a nice look back at the year. At first, the video could only be played on computer, but thanks to some work Ed did, it can now also be played on a DVD player. Some odd things happened in the conversion, but it's certainly of suitable quality.

To our knowledge, Connor has never seen anything on TV that actually interested him (though we suspect there was a period of about a week where his last nanny let him watch PBS - he busted her one day by pointing to the remote and saying her name). He's been privvy to a few football games, but after the excitement of seeing a ball wears off, he's likely to just go back to doing something that in his mind is much more fun - like coloring, or reading, or running around wildly. All of this has changed. Ed popped in the DVD of Connor and Connor was completely impressed with himself. Anytime a photo of Ed or I came on, he would identify "mama" or "dada". And, with each new photo, he would light up and say "da" pointing to the screen. That's about 500 utterances of "da".


The best part of the movie was when it got to one of only three live action shots in the movie (I had trouble getting the movie from the camcorder to the computer, sigh). There is a little clip of Connor when he was just starting to walk. He was holding on to Ed's hands, getting ready to walk to me. Connor let go, waved his arms back and forth to steady himself, and then fell right at my feet. Connor laughed. If only Ed and I could go inside Connor's head and know what he was thinking. Was he thinking "Wow, that kid on the screen sure looks funny when he walks" or was he thinking "Wow, I used to walk like that? It's amazing I didn't break my neck." I guess we'll never know.