The Youngest Bain EVER!

Oliver’s 1st birthday

It’s a big deal to travel with a baby. It’s hard for different reasons at different ages, and I can only imagine that it’s a lot harder with multiple kids.

But we HAD to take Oliver to the Cape this summer. He needed to drink in a little Cape magic, and we knew it’d be a riot to do a joint b-day party for him and his granddaddy (both born 7/30).

I knew that everyone involved would take a million pics, so I figured I’d focus a little more on video. By the time the week was done, I’d shot 86 minutes of footage on 3 different cameras.

I knew that’d take a while to go through, but I hadn’t accounted for the fact that I’d also be swamped with work after returning from a week off. That’s why this is being posted two weeks after the fact.

A few more things:

• Most movie crews have a “second unit” that deals with things like establishing shots (e.g. the quick shot from outside a house right before a cut to people in the kitchen talking). I felt at times like I needed a second unit on this trip. Without some of that filler footage, there’s a noticeable lack of context in many “scenes”.
• I know that no one has any interest in watching a 16 minute video of someone else’s kid. That’s fine. Don’t watch it. But I felt like making this to preserve the memory, and if any part of it is interesting to anyone else, by all means enjoy.
• I shot the video with a Kodak PlaySport (it was a groomsman gift at my brother’s wedding). It goes underwater safely, which is neat, but I realized quickly that Oliver doesn’t go underwater, so, other than a few quick shots of his thighs, I didn’t really use that feature :-)
  • I didn’t always do a stellar job of holding the camera steady. Sorry about that.
• I always like to stress with this stuff that I’m really careful not to let the filming and photographing of any major milestones get in the way of actually enjoying them in real-time. I shoot 10 seconds at a time, and there’s tons of stuff I don’t shoot. During some of the most special moments (e.g. the pony, the cake) I handed the camera to my sister’s boyfriend, Matt, who did some great camera work and freed me up to just be dad.

Oliver grew up a lot on the Cape. All the interaction and attention was obviously great for him. He was a great sport about constantly being the center of attention, and he performed his “tricks” whenever asked. We’d hoped he might take his first steps while he was there, but it didn’t quite come together in time.

We’re so thankful to Ann and Bill for hosting/planning/spoiling, but we got a lot of help everyone in the family throughout the week. THANKS A MILLION!

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