Look Who's Crawling (sort of)

Baby Yoga

For the past few weeks, Christian has been desperately trying to learn how to crawl.

He has already mastered rolling over...

...and getting up on all fours...

...but the art of crawling continues to elude him.

However, his attempts at crawling have turned him into a baby yoga master. Here are a few of the yoga poses that Christian can do:

Chatarunga


Downward-Facing Dog


Plank


Cat Pose


Don't worry Christian. With time you will figure out crawling too!

Ava Crawling for Real

After several weeks of slithering, belly-flopping, and nose-diving, Ava has finally learned to properly crawl. She was long overdue for a nap when we made her perform for the camera this afternoon, which is the reason for her grumbling and grunting as she makes her way across the family room floor. Crankiness aside, she did put on a crawling performance worthy of sharing. With a now mobile eight-month-old on our hands, it is clearly time for us to kick the baby-proofing up another level. The Furrs' Valuables Security Threat Level has been raised to red.

Learning To Crawl

For the last several days, Ava has been showing signs that learning to crawl has moved its way to the top of her to-do-list. Having mastered rolling over, crawling seemed the logical next step. However, what we've witnessed her doing as she moves from point A to point B is not what one might call crawling. We're not sure what to call it, but knew that still images would do it no justice. So, we decided to capture her movement on video. Then, however, came the problem of how to get the video off the camcorder and on to the blog.

We purchased our first camcorder last November before Ava was born. The camcorder records in a high-definition format called AVCHD, which is supposedly the next big thing in the world of "prosumer" camcorders. In the meantime, however, the format is not supported by most video editing software (at least not without spending a lot of money). So this meant we had to resort to using the Sony-developed software which came free with the camcorder. Typically the software which ships with consumer electronics leaves much to be desired. In this case, we have to credit Sony with actually making decent software once you figure out how to use it. The main problem was trying to understand the manual, which was obviously written by a Japanese speaker that thought he could construct intelligible sentences in English.

Fear not...after several hours we figured out how to convert the AVCHD file to MPEG-2 and make it small enough to just squeak by You Tube's 100 MB size limit. Without further adieu, we present Ava in her feature film premiere....

(We had wanted to lay down an audio track of the theme song from Chariots of Fire, but one can only accomplish so much with an instruction manual written in broken English.)