The first one was taken on Christmas morning. Elsa comes down the stairs and sees her new dollhouse for the first time and plays with it for a while. It is a pretty long movie, but Elsa says a few funny things so I wasn’t sure where to edit it. I thought about putting subtitles in, but hopefully you can decipher most of what she is saying.

The second video is from after dinner, when we were celebrating Elsa’s birthday. We put her in her highchair and she figured out what was coming, and started singing Happy Birthday to herself. Then, we did the “official” singing and she blew out the candles.

Hope everyone is having a Happy New Year!

But there’s something that Elsa likes even more than riding in the shopping cart–pushing it. A few months ago, we took Elsa to the Seattle Children’s Museum. One of the attractions was a kid-size grocery store with plastic food and miniature carts. Elsa loved pushing her carts around; now, she often demands to push the normal-sized cart at the real grocery store.

She also likes to stop and put things in the cart. Lynne or I have to follow behind her, putting back on the shelves the things she’s piled in the cart. When she has put enough items in the cart, she often exclaims “buy it! buy it!”

Here is some video I took a few months ago with my phone at a Von’s in San Diego. In it, Elsa is pushing the cart by herself and piling the cart high with croutons, almonds, and guacamole mix. People in the store thought it was very funny to see an 18-month old baby pushing a full-size shopping cart!

Well, on Saturday, Elsa hit that milestone and walked 64 steps unassisted before grabbing on to a cabinet to see what was inside. And on Sunday, she walked 60+ steps several times, including at Crossroads Mall. So we’re officially giving her a “walking” merit badge!

Elsa has been getting better each day, gaining confidence and branching out to walk alone more often. She hit a milestone this weekend where she now walks as her primary mode of locomotion when she’s already standing (as opposed to sitting down and crawling.)

Here’s a video that captures some of the trials and tribulations of Elsa learning to walk:

Click here if you want to download the high-quality version of the movie, since it looks like the web version has been going up and down…

She’s been standing unaided for several months, and she has been successfully walking behind her push toys for nearly as long. But until last night, unless there was something to hold on to, Elsa would stand up and then eventually sit down.

But last night, she got impatient for her “lawn mower” push toy to get situated and started walking towards it. (Well, more accurately, lunged towards it.)

She was delighted that she could move while standing, and she wanted to try it over and over.

We took some video of her an hour later; by this time Elsa was getting a little bit tired, but you will definitely get the idea.

We are very proud of her and it looks like she’ll be walking soon!

Over the last month, Elsa has become totally mobile. She is now an expert crawler, deftly plodding wherever she wants to go. We built a giant play area for her to roam around in our living room (basically padded mats with gates around them.) Elsa can go anywhere she wants within the play area, and she likes not having to be constantly pulled away from things. (In the rest of the house, some of Elsa’s favorite things to reach for are cords, plastic bags, electronics, and drinking glasses—so you can see the benefits of having a safe play area.)

Elsa loves standing, and she tries to pull herself up wherever she can. She is fairly wobbly still, and can only stand totally unassisted (without holding on to anything) for a maximum of ten seconds, and then she needs to reach out for something to hold on to.

Here’s some video of a typical few minutes of Elsa playing. I was playing TV themes for her on the stereo, hence the unexpected soundtrack:

Elsa is also recognizing more words every week. She knows the names of many of her toys, and she can point to them and retrieve them. Here’s a short video of Elsa pointing to and then chasing after her ball:

Last week, great-grandpa Don came to Seattle with his friend Susan to visit for a few days. We had great fun with them! Here are some pictures from the visit:

Great Grandpa Don’s Visit

As you can see from the video and pictures, Elsa has her two bottom-center teeth now (they came in around a month-and-a-half ago.) She currently has her first upper tooth coming in as well, right in the center.

Elsa’s growing up awfully fast! This week will be her nine-month birthday and well-baby checkup; we’ll let you know how she’s doing and how big she’s grown after the appointment.

Since she was a few weeks old, Elsa would do little bits of “baby talk,” but over the last two weeks she’s become downright chatty. She’ll sit in her chair and talk and talk with us, sometimes for a half hour at a time. We don’t know exactly what she’s saying, but she’s markedly expressive and animated, both in her vocal inflections and her facial expressions.

She’s also learning to reliably grasp her first object: a beautiful silver rattle that was a gift from Lynne’s cousin Carolyn and her family Harry, Michael (our ring bearer), and David. It’s just the perfect size for her little hands to clasp, and it makes an entrancing jingling sound which she loves.

All that said, what Elsa is most interested in is trying to figure out a way to stick the rattle in her mouth.

She’s not quite coordinated enough to target her mouth accurately yet (not to mention that her mouth is way too small to fit the rattle in anyway), but we are consistently amused with watching her try.

Here are a few minutes of video of Elsa playing around with her rattle:

There are 9 movies in all, starting with Christmas 1978 and ending with Christmas 1985. Because the movies have no sound, it’s sometimes a trifle difficult to tell what’s going on, so these will probably be interesting only to people who are actually in them.

My dad only appears in one of them because he’s the one who was (manually) cranking the camera.

I thought it would be fun to post the movies to the web so that everyone could watch them easily.

Movie 1: Christmas 1978

Here is the oldest movie, taken at the old house on Buchholz drive at the end of 1978. I was two-and-a-half years old.

Most of the movie is people (well, principally me) opening presents. Notable in this movie is that I go bowling for the first time.

Movie 2: Christmas 1978 (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the previous movie, focused more on actually playing with the new presents.

In this one, I learn how to dunk a basketball.

Movie 3: Jensen’s Third Birthday Party (1979)

This is footage from my third birthday party in June 1979. Seems like I had a lot of female friends!

I remember lots of the furniture in this one (such as the card table chairs) being used at least until I moved out of the house.

Are You My Mother? is a great book!

Movie 4: Jensen’s Third Birthday Party (Part 2)

Now it’s time to play “pin the tail on Big Bird.”

The thing I love most about this movie is how my mom cheats to make sure that I win, “directing” me towards the target while pointing the neighbor kids subtly away from the target.

Budding parents note, here’s a solid way to build self-esteem!

Movie 5: Parade (1979)

Another movie from 1979, this time a documenting parade that for some reason was bandying by our house.

The thing that amazes me about this movie is how olde-tyme everything looks. Really, it resembles the 1950s Hill Valley scenes in “Back to the Future.”

But not the cars, of course; those have “mid-70s junker” written all over them.

Movie 6: At Nana and Bope’s (1982)

Here we are during one of the hot, halcyon days of summer at Nana and Bope’s condo in Westfield Center.

Carr makes his first appearance, we practice fishing (on the lawn) and learn to use pinwheels.

My cousin Tyler and I have a foot race; I don’t want to spoil the results, but an extra year of age might have given me a manifest advantage…

Movie 7: Christmas 1984

This might have been the Christmas Madeline arrived, but she chose to wait it out in the womb, so Carr and I had one last blissful Christmas as the full centers of attention.

Someone should have bought me a longer bathrobe. Just sayin’.

Movie 8: Christmas 1984 (Part 2)

This is the one and only movie in which my dad appears, as Bopy took over the camera for a few seconds.

Don’t miss the exciting second act, in which Carr and I knock the living crap out of Rocky and Mr. T.

At the end of the movie, Madeline is a newborn baby, getting a piano lesson from Grandma Jo.

Movie 9:

Maddie sits up in her highchair, almost a year old. I get a longer bathrobe and a Pioneer CT-10 tape deck (which I’m embarrassed to admit I still have, and is now considered “vintage.”) Carr unwraps a big cardboard box and seems to be calmly satisfied with it.

Before she was born, we didn’t intend to get one. But after about ten days, we realized we needed every ally we could muster in the ongoing campaign to stave off crying.

It’s not the fanciest swing on the market, but it can move side-to-side or front-to-back, and it has a bunch of scary features we don’t use, like fake cricket sounds and a rotating disco ball of stuffed animals.

Sometimes Elsa loves it and occasionally she hates it, but overall it has been successful at keeping her happy for a few minutes a day.

Here’s some video I shot this afternoon of Elsa contentedly hanging out in her swing:

So, on New Year’s Eve, we decided to have a combined Christmas and New Year’s party. We opened presents, ate fondue, and watched the fireworks.

Here are some pictures we took of Elsa in the holiday dress we bought her months ago (mistakenly assuming that she’d be several weeks old by the time Christmas rolled around):

Christmas 2008

I also shot some video of Elsa in her full Christmas spirit; here’s a short montage of some of the highlights:

Belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’s from all three of us!

As promised, here is some video of Elsa about 10 minutes after she was born, when they were at the tail end of measuring and checking her and getting ready to take her back over to Lynne.

We have a lot more photos and video to share, and I’ll keep posting them as I get time to sort through them and upload them.

Yesterday, Seattle Public Schools canceled all classes because the weather report hinted that there might be a dusting of snow. Of course, it never came.

This morning, though, Seattle got hit with a major storm during the morning commute. It started with rain which got everything wet, and then the temperature dropped, freezing all of the rain into a sheet of ice. Then a foot of snow got dumped on top of the ice. Traffic chaos ensued.

All of the Seattle TV stations are in 9/11 mode, with round-the-clock helicopter shots of empty highways and action reporters beaming back live pictures of steep hills where cars might just, any second, crash. One of the broadcasters breathlessly noted that tonight we’ll see “some of the most dramatic freezing we’ve ever seen!”

Here’s some video I shot around 9am from our living room; we have had another 6-8″ additional snow since the video (and it’s still coming down):

It is pretty chaotic, though. There are buses and trucks jackknifed across the highways, and people have abandoned hundreds of cars all over the roads. Seattle only has like a dozen snow plows, and all of the abandoned and crashed vehicles make it even harder to clear the roadways.

There’s no way we will be able to surmount our steep driveway anytime soon, with temperatures expected to be below freezing until at least next week and another storm on the way Saturday night.

We had the foresight to park one of our cars at the bottom of our hill so, when baby comes, we’ll have to put our crampons on over our shoes, trek down the hill, and hope we can safely navigate to the hospital.

Fun times!

The place where we go to visit the perinatologist has a very fancy ultrasound machine that can do what are called “4D ultrasounds.” Basically, they use computer imaging to try to create a semi-realistic picture of what a baby actually looks like. At the end of the appointment, we got a DVD movie of the ultrasound, including the parts that were done in 4D.

The 4D ultrasounds can be a little creepy, but we got some good shots of what the new baby looks like. We caught her sucking her thumb, yawning, and generally moving around a lot. She was very active during the whole appointment, so it was hard to get her to stay still long enough to get a fully unobstructed shot.

Still, it was pretty interesting for us to see a glimpse of what she will look like!

Here’s a movie I put together of all of the 4D footage we got: