Within 24 hours of posting the massage video, the little one is on a violent throwing up spree! This after a great play session, earlier in the day, with her elder sister and cousins.
She has probably caught some stomach bug and there is a good chance it will go around the house faster than a bag of potato chips. Only time will tell!
So, what is with the title?
Under normal circumstances, the video would have been correlated to the sickness and I would have got orders to shut the blog down.
This time however, there was no such comment from the wife and MIL. It was a refreshing change, to see the throwing up being attributed to the little micro-organisms.
To celebrate this change in the household, here is another video of the little one...
Time to hit the Airborne, Walborne, Riteborne or whatever brandname fizzy tablet, the local drug store dishes out to boost my body with 30,000% the daily dose of anti-cold-flu vitamins, including but not limited to A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H...Z, A1-A256, B1-B26, .. and all the other essential herbal, mineral, vital, nutritional supplements to prepare for the upcoming (or already arrived) flu season!
Here is a stock tip from Dr. Narayanohe. Buy companies that make synthetic vitamin C. You might have a healthy benefit!
Now that Blogger has introduced the instant video uploader (like the photo uploader), I am giving it a shot now.. I will fail in my duty as a technologist if I do not attempt to use cool stuff that gets unleashed on drooling engineers. So here goes..
Hope this works. By the way, after my wife sees this video, this feature might become moot for this blog! My first video blog in pre Youtube days took 3 hours to make and upload. With Youtube, it was 5-10 minutes.
Had promised a video of combo #1 earlier..(a special tantrum thrown by baby at random).
This is not that video. This is combo #2.
Let me explain.
The little one did not cooperate with Mommy during her nail cutting attempts.
She(the little one), was smart enough to follow mommy, find out the secret hiding place where the nailclipper was kept, and got them, just as mommy went on to do other things over a busy weekend.
Feeling something along the lines of the crow that stole the Vadai from the old grandma (TOYWAP, this is from the Tamizh equivalent to Aesop's fables!), she was perched on the couch attempting to cut her own knees, fingers, feet or anything that was close enough to her nails, when she spotted "Secret Video Daddy"!
SVD, feeling the same thing a National geographic photographer feels when he is about to videotape a poor Gazelle just when it is being ambushed by a lioness, was in two minds. Do I continue the video? or do I stop and go pull those clippers out of her hands before she injures herself! SVD decided to do both, at the cost of the video not being secret anymore and the possibility of incurring mommy's wrath on being irresponsible and proving it to the world on video! He kept rolling the tape and tried to use
1. sweet talk 2. scolding 3. threats
and when all failed, resorted to calling in the marines, a.k.a. Jr., who has a strange hold on her little sister. Sometimes, Jr. is able to get things out of the little one's hands when the adults have failed. Last week she got daddy's tea glass from the baby, just when she was going to drop it on the concrete in the backyard, looked at the adults and said "see, that was easy. all you have to do is ask nicely!". If you read carefully, I said "sometimes". Today was not Jr.'s day. She pulled out the clippers on the pretext of asking nicely and the little one promptly went on to combo #1...
SVD does not think the world is ready to see Combo #1! That will have to wait.
SVD also thinks he has no chance of controlling these girls by the time they become teenagers. He is wondering if he will be alive to see them reach their teens at this rate!
After searching high and low, finally found the SONY Imagemixer install CD this weekend!
That means, I get to videoblog again. So downloaded some clips from the old(?! I guess a 2003 DV camcorder is OLD) camcorder from the recent trip. Found out soon enough that the sound was not being recorded. Then remembered having the same problem 4 years ago, fixed it and now after some rush editing, you have
The quality is actually better than what the old Canon S30 was dishing out during its last days.
Now that I can take secret videos again, I am thrilled..
I was reminescing about my first video blog, which happened to be my 100th post! It took me forever to do that videoblog, in days before Youtube. Had to sign up for many accounts, create your own image for the file, link it to windows media player, etc., but it still worked!
We get so used to these improvements that anything old school (which may be just 4 years or even 2 years old) seems arcane!
We had promised ourselves a one day trip to Big Sur, when we had visited Julia Pfeiffer Burns park last Christmas. This week we finally made it. It was also a little anniversary treat.
We were all having a good time, until...
The little one decided to walk a 0.3 mile steep trail by herself. She would insist on holding my hand, her mothers hand as well her blanket wedged between her shoulder and head and walk the trail at the same time. Talk about having your cake, eating it too, and more.
Any attempts to lift her and walk, would end up in a wail, falling on the floor head first, a rolling action of the torso, with her butt held high in the air and legs kicking, all at once. A motion so complicated, yet executed in such a fashion that spiders, centipedes and other organisms with complicated body structures would dedicate temples in her honor.
We were at the bottom of a waterfall view point, when this tantrum (which I call Combo #1) started. I picked the little one up and started running. San, Balaji and the few other hikers present, were trying to find out what I was searhing for. It was a weird sight with a guy running around with a screaming, fighting kid on his shoulder, looking at the ground.
I was literally searching for "ground"! Combo #1 starts with "falling on the floor". When you are on a steep trail with rocks and roots everywhere on the ground, the surface doesnt provide the adequate banging cushion for a 19 month old kid! These manouvers were perfected on carpeted floors and the little one is still learning the concept of relative hardness.
Granted, it was not as glamorous as a Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson trying to find some field in a foreign location, to land their bullet ridden plane with the tail in flames. But I was in effect trying to do the exact same thing. Safely land the little one on a flat surface so she can start banging her head on the floor and teach the wild life at Big Sur a thing or two about showing displeasure. I kept running and finally dropped her on a wooden bridge. She promptly bumped her head on the wood, put her butt high in the air, did the kicking and screaming routine.
By this time, everyone in our little travel group caught up with me. I was expecting a pat on the back for saving the little one's head. But they did not understand why I even dropped her on the ground in the first place and gave me the "how cruel?" look.
They did get to see Combo #1 in gory detail multiple times as we walked back and have probably forgiven me by now.
I am still working on a video blog of all the different tantrum combos. The compiled movie will hit your screens sometime before 4th of July!
Here is the bridge, and the little one crossing it before she entered her phase.
And in other news, got the new camera on Friday, :) And in other other news, will get the lens only on Monday, :( !!! So the photo and video you see were all the work of the old S30.
Monday, October 8, 2007 at 10:46PM 
