it's almost impossible to put into words how wonderful it is to find that someone you don't even know has decided to send your son whom they have never met a birthday present all the way from caracas, venezuela. and not just any present, but a movie made from the pictures that i've taken of odin over the past year; i've made a few movies and know just how time consuming they can be to make!

and it's also difficult to articulate how special it's going to be for odin to realize when he's old enough to make such realizations that there are people in the world like caterina ( and here ) and her daughter isabel who take the time to give to strangers. it's a nice lesson to learn, i think.

caterina had uploaded some versions of the movie in time for odin's birthday but she thought it would be nice ( and we agree! ) for us to have a more permanent version on cd and it took a little while to get to us what with all the moving around we've been doing. as an added bonus though, in the new version she's included more recent photos! hopefully she won't mind that i've uploaded large [ 13 megabytes ] and small [ 3 megabytes ] versions of the movie so you can see the movie as well.

in addition to the great movie caterina's daughter isabel sent odin some fantastic finger puppets, which i think she might have made herself ( handmade or not they're super cute and we'll treasure them for a long time to come ).

as with most new things, odin needs to take a minute to study it very seriously to investigate the new playthings that his pops has on his fingers while trying to take a picture with the camera :-)