Babble-on.

I've heard that second babies often talk later than their older siblings due to the older one stepping in to speak on their behalf. While Leah does her share of putting words (and other things for that matter) in her sister's mouth, Natalie's holding her own fairly well.

Her vocabulary is expanding each week and includes basic necessities: up, down, off, on, and "Bop," her word for book, read to me, and other actions to be carried out by us. Before she's completely fluent, I thought I'd share this video of her "talking."

I adore her little mouth and the way she forms these complicated and unintelligible phrases. At the end, you'll see Leah in her Halloween puppy costume relishing the chance to role play and look the part.



Somewhere there is a country or region that can understand what she just said.

Having a Tiny Bit of Fun

After seeing this stop-motion animation, I am fascinated by "Tilt-Shift" photography. To do it genuinely requires some sneaky lens work, but to fake it requires only a decent photo, some graphic manipulation software, and a little time.

In the wee hours of the night, I found a neat-o tutorial for GIMP and worked out a few shots that I think are worthy of sharing.

The first is a shot taken off the side of a bridge in Panama:



Here's our cruise ship in "miniature":



A view of the escarpment of the beautiful Georgian Bay of Ontario:



A Twins game at the dome:



And, finally, "toy" boats in the bay at Tobermory, Ontario:



When viewing the last one, I tend to hear the snappy tune from Mister Roger's neighborhood in my head. These also remind me of visiting a number of cities in miniature, years ago, in England. Quite a few cities, it seemed, had a Lilliputian version of themselves, and no detail was omitted - there was even a miniature version of the miniature city!

I have always loved tiny things: doll house food, train sets, and Micro Machines (I used to have the MM of this beauty). This photo manipulation technique lets me explore my perspective on life without meditation or a helicopter ride. What fun!

It must have been the cookies...

We are a happy happy household tonight. Most of our good cheer is due to the events of tonight that be printed boldface in history textbooks henceforth. Some of it is because we're all on a sugar high.

Leah and I made "Obama Cookies" this afternoon in hope that they would become victory victuals after the polls closed and the results were submitted. The recipe is a basic butter cookie set from Martha's Everyday Cooking. We rolled out the dough, cut big circles with a drinking glass, and cut small circles from the larger ones using the removable center part of the blender lid.



The recipe made two tall stacks of "O"s plus a couple of flag experiments.



I ran out of powdered sugar so I couldn't make a royal icing, but I did have some leftover cake frosting and it worked, more or less, in a pinch.



They're tasty with or without frosting, look pretty cute, and totally did the trick. Yeee-haw!

January 20th can't come fast enough. We are so proud of you, Barack!