By Jason
Ever since I got my Nexus One I’ve been taking a lot more little video clips of Athena. Although I’ve uploaded some of them to YouTube and Ann and I have shared some on Facebook, I haven’t been very good at posting them here.
This post will catch everyone up with Athena’s latest video hits. I tend to like photography better than video but it’s hard to show Athena’s new fascination with her own shadow with a still frame:
It’s also much harder to see how our little girl has developed such advanced etiquette and table manners for a 1-year-old without a video like this one:
In all seriousness, Athena is very quick to pick up cause and effect. If she sees Ann and I do something a few times she’s usually ready to give it a go herself – she knows how to turn the TV on and off, always wants to press elevator buttons, and she knows how keys work (even if she’s still not tall enough to use them):
You might remember how much Athena enjoys the swings at the playground. Although she’s still very thin, Athena is growing taller quickly, and she’s finally tall enough to ride in the toddler swing all by herself:
She’s also constantly escalating her feats of acrobatism. It’s hard to believe that we’ve had her play yard disassembled since July last year, when she climbed over the top of it. At this point every object in the house must be knocked over and scaled:
That one is actually pretty mild compared to some of her climbs, I’m afraid to put video of it on the web. I’m also saving a few recent videos for the next update because this one is already getting long.
As for what we’ve been up to lately, last week we went to the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium with Sandy and her cousin Nivi. I wanted to go to the Sausalito Cetacean Institute instead but this was a good second choice.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
We were excited to see Athena’s reaction to all the big fish and bright colors, and she really had a ball. It’s very hard to get photos inside the aquarium because of the low light – you notice the few I managed to get are very grainy from the high ISO setting I had to use.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
Here’s Athena standing inside a concave part of a multi-story tank – it almost looks like she’s in the tank.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
Here’s Athena showing me the river exhibit. We can add the word “fish” to her vocab list, and this time I know I’m not selectively hearing it because another dad there heard it too.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
The aquarium has a lot of interactive, touchable exhibits for kids. Here’s Athena playing in the touchpool, before she started trying to drink the water and Ann had to put her back down.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
A fun photo under a crashing artificial tide:
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
Athena also had some fun running around outside on the deck chasing pigeons:
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |
We didn’t manage to make it through the trip without another public display of Athena’s eating issues, but overall it was very fun. I’ll end with a photo of Sandy and Athena watching the jellyfish. I took some more photos of the sea life that you can see in the Picasa album. A few of them turned out okay but I started to feel bad taking them – I have a nice camera but I really don’t have the equipment for this kind of photography. I wouldn’t feel bad taking an extra moment here and there to focus and whatnot except everywhere I went there were dozens of people with digital cameras and camera phones. It was like no one could just look at anything to enjoy it. Weird.
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| From Monterey Bay Aquarium |