A happy, happy birthday to you from me

Lars is three today!! Or as he says it, "thlee" (or as he used to say it, "thlee, thlee").

When Lars was almost out at 10:30 p.m. on June 12, 2011 my doctor told Matt, "Go ahead and grab the baby." So Matt grabbed the baby and swung him onto my chest. I have a brain-video in my mind of that moment (right after the moment where I checked for the boy-or-girl evidence) where Lars, crumpled against my chest with his face three inches from mine, looked straight at me with his left eye only, his right eye squeezed firmly shut, and screamed in my face. I adore that brain-video and have replayed it ever since I woke up this morning on his third birthday. Right now, while the rest of the family sleeps and I post this, he's happily sitting and watched "The Tangled," his favorite movie. Today...once the sun comes up since it's barely 6 a.m....we're going to shop for his presents (I'm counting on Ida to distract him while I drop things into the cart), make cake "with blueberry frosting," hang with his play school friends, and (dun dun dun) dispose of his binky (he says he's ready...we'll see).

Songs: "Joy Parade" by Lennon and Maisy and "Robin in the Rain" by Raffi

__________________________________________

User note: My first attempt making one of these slideshows with iMovie (on an iPad--my desktop is a PC) had its ups and downs. My sister has long made fun of me for using a free online service to make these birthday videos, but honestly they were a lot more idiot-proof than iMovie. In fact I still would have used the service (One True Media) if it hadn't shut down a few weeks ago. (I guess most people who like to make slideshows prefer to be fancy about it.) The same things that are great about the iMovie app (or for that matter, Windows Movie Maker) are the things that annoy me, though. You can do all kinds of fine-tuning, but you can also accidentally undo your fine-tuning with one swipe and then not find a way to undo that undoing. (There is one Undo function but it doesn't help if your clumsy fingers have undone a few things in one and a half swipes.) 

One thing that I could have spent more time fine-tuning was the "Ken Burns effect" (which automatically gives movement to photos in a slideshow, a la a Ken Burns documentary). I didn't want to entirely turn it off (not that I could figure out how to do that anyway) but I also didn't want to get seasick whenever I watched it. And I also didn't want to spend hours adjusting it. So I spent a little bit of time adjusting it and then just lived with the result. I also accidentally lost one of the video files during the upload process, and then when I restored it I neglected to adjust the background audio, so those 5 seconds of audio are a little jarring. Maybe someday if I recover from the effort it took to upload the iMovie to YouTube (which involved deleting a lot of iPad data and a few space-filling apps) I'll fix the audio on that part and reload it.