Tag: Abigail

As the black puffy pouches under Emily’s eyes will tell you, Abigail does not regularly sleep (or allow her parents to sleep!) very well between the hours of 11:00PM and 5:00AM.

We’ve tried a few strategies to encourage Abby to sleep at night. During the daylight hours, we make her do infant calisthenics, we regularly poke her with a sharp stick to keep her awake, and we coat her clothing with peanut butter to ensure that Hogan will constantly lick her if she tries to sneak some Z’s while we are distracted.

Unfortunately, none of these tactics has paid dividends, so we have had to take our game up a notch. We have begun “crib training” Abigail. Crib training is all about encouraging “wise choices” through classical conditioning.

As you can see from the picture of Abigail’s crib, we have a subdued, happy mobile on the “GOOD” side and a bizarre, angry mobile on the “EVIL” side. We begin the night by placing Abby with her head towards the sweet dream-enhancing critters of the “GOOD” mobile, but if Abigail refuses to sleep quietly, we turn her around to face the “EVIL” mobile. Remember… we are parents, not friends!

The “GOOD” mobile offers a pleasant parade of friendly critters who frolic counterclockwise to a lullaby softly plinked out by a wind-up powered music box. It’s a little slice of baby heaven!

The “EVIL” mobile features a large blue poison frog, a smiling (but stinging!) hornet, a miniature “monkey shines” haunted chimpanzee, a dangling poison sumac leaf, and a mechanized set of pincer leaves that close savagely like a half-starved Venus fly-trap at irregular, shocking intervals. This violent action is set to an instrumental soundtrack titled “Biting Insects of the Uncomfortably Humid Amazon.”

Eventually we may be able to remove the training aids, but when and if this happens is entirely up to Abby. We only hope we won’t be forced to use the evil clown mobile. The evil clown mobile offers excellent short-term silence, but its long-term psychological effects remain controversial.

People are always asking me, “Abigail, how do you keep yourself looking so suave and dapper all the time even though you spend the bulk of your day pooping and peeing in your diaper, spitting up all over your jammies, and rolling around on the floor?”

It’s really pretty simple as you can see from the shots above! If you have the means, I highly recommend that you get yourself one or two of these giant servants. I couldn’t imagine my day without staff… I just couldn’t imagine!

We have a Canon PowerShot SD750 Digital ELPH and the experience of taking over 35 million pictures of our Rhodesian Ridgeback in various stages of sleep, so though we would never go so far as to suggest that you “not try this at home,” we’re pretty sure that your efforts wouldn’t produce the same bar-raising photographi(que) awesomeness… at least not at first. In the following sequence of shots, you can clearly make out the furious side to side and threatening down to up movements exhibited by the rather-be-sleeping wee one during parent-mandated exercise session #2.

As hummingbirds hover at a flower or feeder, their wings can beat up to 80 times per second, which produces their signature hum, and you must take a similar approach with you when filming Abigail. To the naked eye—and often to your naked  or poorly dressed camera—the wings (or the arms! or the legs!)  are just a nauseating blur. Often the first question I’m asked by the ubiquitous cult of the amateur is what shutter speed I use to tame this ludicrously fast action sequence. Ha! Shutter speed schmutter speed… everyone in the know understands it’s all about the high speed flash! Come on now!

Whether you’re capturing the in flight humming bird wing or the inclined domestic Abisaurus doing head ups during tummy time, it takes immense photographic skill and timing to isolate the beasts’ fast-twitch muscle movements enough for the human eye to perceive, let alone to enjoy. There are no shortcuts! But never fret, kind reader, because here at Moorezilla.com we’ve done all the heavy lifting for you!

People say to us all the time, “hey… that Abigail is quite possibly the most photogenic child ever produced. How do we get a nicely printed picture of Abigail to replace the stock photo that came with the nifty frame we just purchased from Target?”

Well, folks, it’s really easy. If you head on over to the Moorezilla Gallery, and click on the picture you fancy, and then (this is important!) click on the link for “full size” that appears to the upper right of the photo, you’ll have the largest file size availabe for that particular photo. You want the largest size photo regardless of what size photo you want to print. Once you have the largest size, click on the link on the left that says “Print on Shutterfly.com” and you’re on your way to having a frameable picture of your choice and size mailed to your house.

There are many other ways to get your own prints, including downloading the “Full Size” file of the picture you want to your hard-drive and uploading it to a site (like the CVS photo site) that allows you to upload and order prints. Also, if you have a photo printer and want to print your own pictures, I highly suggest downloading and using a free tool like Google’s Picasa, that will allow you to automatically scale files to print out at whatever size you would like.

On November 24 at about 6:00PM, Abigail Jane went home.

These are also in the Moorezilla Gallery, but some people were having trouble finding the gallery, so here they are here… as they say.