A Project Completed

So before The Boy was born, like many parents-to-be, The Ex and I went out and bought a camcorder.  We planned on videotaping the birth as well as many other precious moments that we were sure we wouldn't want to miss.  And video we did.  We video-ed my tummy with The Boy still in it; rolling all around.  We video-ed the trip to the hospital, the entire birth, and many other moments after that.  If we wanted to see said moments we would all crowd around this tiny camcorder and look at the little screen.  After a while we figured out how to hook the camcorder up to the TV so we could watch things there.  But the entire reason I wanted to buy it was so that I could make DVD's for my kids to watch later.  When I was young my parents had one of those old super-8 machine's with the ginormous light at the top of it and they "taped" stuff that we would watch back on a big white projector screen that we would set up in our living room.  It had no sound, but man, did I love seeing those old video's.  I dreamed of giving my kids a more modern version of the same thing.

But see, this is where it got tough.  My computer was a PC.  I had been a PC girl my entire life.  But for the life of me, I could not get the damn little cassette tapes to somehow go onto my computer and then get onto a DVD.  It seemed impossible.  I talked to all the "computer guru" people I knew, I went to the big stores, I bought fire wires and cables and all sorts of crap.  All to no avail.  Those precious tapes were damned to be on that little camcorder forever.  Until.  Until in February of 2008, I bought my first imac.  Oh the love I felt.  For so many reasons.  But the main reason being that if I plugged the cord from my camcorder into the back of my mac, it just popped on the screen and allowed me to transfer any and all of my tapes into imovie.  It was the ease that I had dreamed of.  And so at that point we began the project of making The Boy's birth video.

And today I finally finished it.  Just shy of his third birthday, but most importantly, BEFORE his brother or sister arrived, it is done.  It is almost 25 minutes long and it took about three months to do it, off and on.  I incorporated all the photos as well as all the movie clips we have and put it all to music and made titles and commentary throughout.  I am pretty proud of it.  It shows Mommy with her HUGE belly before the birth, and documents the birth itself, as well as all the people who came to the hospital to meet The Boy and goes through when they wheeled me out in my wheelchair to take him home for the first time.  I cannot tell you how many tears I shed while making this thing.  And along with that I can't tell you how much I cry every single time I watch it, or work on it.  It is just such an emotional time.  Not only is the birth of any child emotional, but obviously The Ex and I were still together during this time.  We had been having problems, but we were still very much a couple.  And I wanted The Boy to know that.  So I put in many clips and comments that were SO hard to, not only look at, but include.  Every time I worked on it I tried to put my mind back where we were right when he arrived, and make it from that point of view.  Not my current jaded point of view.  But it is so important to me that The Boy know that he was conceived out of the love of his two Mommies and that even though we aren't together now, that when he came here, we were.  

But that makes it very hard for me to watch.  Such hopes and dreams.  And since The Ex moved out on The Boy's 6 month birthday, it is sad to me that he didn't get to live with that vision very long.  And while making this I have realized that I am still quite pissed about it.  Not necessarily pissed at how I was treated, but pissed over what The Boy missed out on.  Pissed that he will never know the previous 5 years before he was here and how much his Mom and Mommy loved each other.  But I don't want to dwell on the past.  The project is done.  My project for my boy.  I know as he gets older he will absolutely LOVE to have this.  And even now we watch it and talk about what is going to happen when Mommy has the second baby.  Since I had a c-section with him (emergency) and will have a voluntary c-section with the second, I think it helps him to understand what will happen when Mommy goes to the hospital to have his little brother or sister.  And since my tummy is getting quite large (another post for another day, and yes, I will include photographic evidence of said tummy) he is starting to understand for real that there is another baby in there and what that means.  This project will help him get even further with that.  And it will also show him how very much I love that little boy.  Even if I do cry like an idiot every single time we watch it.