ajmatt blog » videos

Spring brings

allegra — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:14:12 +0000

Rainbow pants,
playground swings,
and a troupe of invisible Muppets.

I wish I could see the Muppets.

The evolution of Dr. Eva

allegra — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 03:14:02 +0000

Back in November, for no particular reason, Matt ordered a set of Muppet Babies books off of Ebay, and we gave Eva the books for Christmas. They were the first gift she opened, and as soon as she saw “Piggy Visits the Doctor,” Christmas was essentially over. Why did we think she would want any other gifts?

Since Christmas, we’ve had a miniature doctor in the house, and I have learned that anything can be turned into a doctor kit.

In this picture I’m getting my eyes checked with a Lego piece, and Eva has a stethoscope (a yo-yo) around her neck. She is also wearing her great-grandmother’s pearls.

Our entry way is the doctor’s office. Here Eva is holding one of her many doctor bags (a gift bag) and giving Kermit, Yot, and Elmo checkups on crinkly doctor paper (tissue paper form the same gift).

Here Dr. Eva multitasks. In between fixing the screen door like Daddy (those are drill bits in her apron pocket) and making cupcakes, she gives Kermit a checkup.

I was planning to get Eva a doctor kit for her birthday, but I stumbled across one at Target last week and lost my willpower.

Does this mean she’s ready for her residency with the Muppets?

There are more pictures in the photo gallery and a longer video on YouTube where we take an in-depth look at the controversial topic “Band-aids: Pretend or Real?”

Toddler street style

allegra — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:27:14 +0000

Sometimes: when you haven’t updated your pictures in a month… and your holiday cards went out in January… and you spend all your time working on other people’s WordPress websites… it’s just too much to get caught up.

So forget the holidays and look at these pictures I took yesterday!

It cracks me up that among all of the blurry cell phone pictures I took, two look like Eva was posing for The Sartorialist: Playground Edition.

Aside from the grown-up looking posts (they are an illusion of photography), there was quite a bit of imaginative play going on behind the scenes – which I can’t get enough of. Take a look at where Eva was traveling at our new favorite playground.

Grandparents, et al., I will get the holiday pictures up. Someday.

Family of Muppets

allegra — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:21:39 +0000

Two weeks ago we purchased the new Muppets movie soundtrack. I already have most of it committed to memory. One week ago we took Eva to see her very first movie. Guess what that was? This week we are having dance parties to “Me Party” and we have a new topic of conversation:

ALLEGRA: Eva, are you a girl or a Muppet?

EVA: [in a grave whisper] A Muppet.

MATT: Is Mama a girl or a Muppet?

EVA: Mama is a grey Miss Piggy.

ALLEGRA: Okay. Is Daddy a boy or a Muppet?

EVA: A Muppet.

And then there’s poor Kermit, who just joined our Muppet family yesterday. Let’s hope he survives the experience.

Leaf dance

allegra — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:12:14 +0000

I am having a hard time keeping up with my errands this month. Who wants to go to the grocery store when there are leaves on the ground?

(See also: the self portrait leaf dance video, where Eva can see herself in the camera while I take the video.)

Why go to Home Depot when there are so many things to see in your yard? Like the tiny helicopter seeds in the Japanese Maple and the willow tree in the back yard that “swings” when the wind blows. And this amazing tree in front of our house:

I think Eva best expressed the awesomeness of this tree when she said, “WHOOOA! The tree turned to red leaves!”

Note: I wrote this post last week. Since then, we took a spontaneous Friday night trip to Home Depot (this is the excitement of the suburbs, people). And I finally made it to the grocery store on Sunday during Eva’s nap. But not before I found the back of the freezer – and I think it’s good to do that once a year.

Ballet!

allegra — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:46:15 +0000

And I thought succumbing to pink was the end of the girly invasion. I give you the cutest thing ever: a leotard, tights, and tiny ballet shoes. Upside-down, of course.

It wasn’t enough that the girly world suck me in. The equally jaded Uncle Austin was in town, and is now also under the spell of ballet.

Joking aside, ballet is the perfect activity for a two-year-old. It involves music, funny stretching, hand motions, a teddy bear dance, and movements that mimic animals. Eva was enraptured for 35 minutes.

And the best part? No Mamas allowed! 35 minutes to sit and read. Or obsessively watch the video monitor. (Austin and I might have chosen the latter.)

I put a few more pictures up in the photo gallery, and if you’re the kind of person that likes to decipher Eva’s speech, watch this video on YouTube.

Matt & Eva

allegra — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:29:18 +0000

This is classic Matt and Eva:

Suburban life

allegra — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 19:37:17 +0000

You know that place on the map where the squiggly street lines give way to blank space? That’s where we live now. The last housing tract right before a bunch of farmland. Things have been quiet around here (except in the photo gallery) as we settled into our new house. Here are a few things we’ve been doing the last 2.5 months.

We moved on May 14th and May 15th. I posted pictures of our empty house here, which Eva found entertaining.

My family flew in from Washington and California a few days after the move to help us unpack. When you have six people working, you can almost get a whole house unpacked in just one week. It was pretty amazing.

Matt and I took a week off to move, then both of us went right back to work and we’ve been busy. This is evidenced by Eva’s sudden obsession with working. If I leave my office unguarded, Eva likes to climb in my chair and pound on the keyboard and announce, “Eva is working.” She’s created some faux tasks in Outlook, but luckily she hasn’t sent any of my customers email.

In addition to working, I managed to completed the very first summer NaNoWriMo this month… and finish a few days early. After this experience, I have to say I do not recommend participating in NaNoWriMo if you are a stay-at-home-mom/business owner. It is too much. I suspected as much when I skipped it last November, and unless all of my business disappears I won’t do it again this November.

In the meantime, Matt has become Mr. Home Improvement. He and my dad painted our basement TV room, Matt painted our mudroom, and now he’s working on his dream of having a bright red dining room. He’s also patched our driveway, painted our light post, and fixed our air conditioning. After which he said, “I never knew how air conditioning worked. Now I do.” I really like this newfound skill set.

In absence of some of our old activities, Eva and I have been spending a ton of time outdoors. Our neighborhood was built in the late 1990′s, so we are lucky to have some real trees. Our new playground is a wooded area, which means it’s shaded all the time, as are my new running trails. And let me tell you, this makes a huge difference on a 90 degree day. It also means there are a lot of great sticks (Eva calls them all “dog sticks”) for toddlers to find.

We have a community pool that is fantastic for little kids. It is set up like a beach, which means two-year-olds who are afraid of their own shadow feel comfortable walking right in. We also have a deck at home and an inflatable pool, which means if we’re too tired to go out, we can have a pool experience right on our back porch. Eva has really bonded with her fish pool.

Finally, we’re enjoying all of our extra space. Eva can spread out her toys and not block a main pathway. Do you get the sense she’s a Lego kind of girl?

And on days when the heat index is 115 degrees, she can burn off energy by running laps around the kitchen.

While I’m still in mourning for our beloved Duncan library and Alexandria Gymboree, I really appreciate Ashburn’s empty stores and roads. And I’m looking forward to starting our busy fall schedule, which includes some free time for me. And that’s something that was hard to come by in Alexandria.

Laughter

allegra — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:11:14 +0000

You would think there would be a story behind this much laughing, but it was just a giggly kind of day. Please enjoy three minutes of Eva losing her mind.

Two days in the dark

allegra — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 03:53:00 +0000

Eva and I entertained a few more contractors in our house early this week. (Why all the contractors? That’s another blog entry for the relatively near future.) These contractors had to shut down the main power supply to our house for most of Monday and Tuesday.

Eva has been cutting her two-year molars for a few weeks now, so between being cooped up in the dark and the pain, we vacillated between giddy and screaming. And I mean the kind of screaming that causes all of your neighbors to look out the window to see if someone is dying in the street, only to find it’s just a toddler who likes the sound of her own voice.

To entertain ourselves we of course did a ton of reading. It was more structured than usual as I tried to conserve books, and we ended up with a good book pile.

Beyond reading, the theme of both days was technology. On Monday Eva took a shine to my card reader. She tried to plug it in her teddy bear and took a pretend nap with it. I would love to know what she thought would happen – or maybe something did happen and I was too old to see it.

On Monday, I tried to teach Eva to take videos with the camera, but it didn’t work out. Instead, we had fun with the video camera on my cell phone. “Eeeeeee!” is what Eva calls herself, and every time the video cuts out Eva has managed to turn it off, which she thought was hysterical. So enjoy a much needed dose of toddler laughter with me.

Yesterday Eva spent a good amount of time playing with the lens cap. She knows perfectly well where the lens cap goes, but for some reason she really wanted it to fit in Llama Llama’s red pajamas. You will also see a brief appearance by Zombie Baby during the last few seconds.

Finally, there is a bonus video, but I only recommend it if you can’t get enough Eva videos (you know who you are!) or like to watch oddball toddler development in action.