Martin and Hazel Frost Our Life in Argentina

Health Warning; Those with possible allergies to poor-quality home movies of someone else’s kids, may be advised to sit this one out.

I've meaning to get round to putting these clips up for a couple of weeks, so they seemed like a suitable boxing day project which should at least please the long-distance grandparents.

The following two and a half minutes represent a scale model of the two and a half hours we spent at Joni’s nursery Christmas party; divided roughly evenly between hoiking him up onto the inflatable slide, and catching occasional glimpses of him as he rushed to and fro on the bouncy castle. Apparently there were other activities on offer, but we couldn't tell you a lot about them.

And the next one, apart from being Joni on his trike, was a little experiment to see if I could add sound. The music is one of our favourite songs by Raffi Actually, it’s a good job we like it, because as Joni’s favourite CD we get to hear it most days. Getting the music off the CD and editing it to fit the video was quite a learning curve. I’ve been mightily impressed by the Nero suite that I found on Martin’s computer, from which I used Startsmart and Wave to create the sound. Unfortunately Virtual Dub then scrambled it, which is why it is now all over the place. Apparently it’s a known bug and the young geek who developed Virtual Dub (just tried to abbreviate it to VD but this is a family show) says he hopes to fix it for the next version.

Joni loves seeing himself on video, he can watch the same short clips over and over again for really quite a long time. Possibly he thinks he’s been catapulted to stardom along with his real super-heros "Thomas" (the Tank Engine) and “Sormaseep” (Shaun the Sheep).