Yes, those two topics go together and we had to deal with both the last few weeks. Fortunately, everything worked out for the best.

Last week we had a party for little Kevin’s first birthday. But in the beginning of the week we had a bit of a scare. KayceeAnn woke up with a fever one day. She had the fever on and off for two days and we were worried that she might have Dengue fever. Here in Davao del Sur, Dengue fever is at epidemic levels and there were over 375 confirmed cases with 10 fatalities last month. We’ve had lots of rain and there are too many mosquitoes here.

We took her to the hospital the next day where they gave her a blood test. The blood test was negative and it turned out she had a cold. We went through the exact same thing when little Kevin developed a high fever a few days later and again we thought the worst.

We took him to the clinic, but it was so full we left for the hospital. Here in Digos we have three hospitals. But this time, all the hospitals were full with long waiting lines to see a doctor. Luckily, we took her to the new hospital on the way out of town where the waiting time to get tested wasn’t so long. Again we found that he didn’t have Dungue fever. We were happy, but we still had two children with bad colds.

By the time of Kevin’s birthday, everyone was healthy again so we planned a party with food and cake. Mama invited her co-teachers and Virgie invited some of her co-workers. It’s funny, by the time we were ready to give the kids some food, we had an additional ten to fifteen kids here- just the neighborhood kids mingling in. Good thing we ordered some extra food and there was enough for everyone.

Video Update :
As you can see from the video, we had the food catered in and we had two clowns to entertain the kids during the party. This video is encoded with the iSkysoft Converter and has better quality than my previous videos.

I’ve been converting my videos to flash using On2 Flix Standard, which is a one-pass flv encoder. The results were ok but not good quality. With this video, I am using a new flv encoder. I was so happy when the video encoder, iSkysoft Video Converter, updated to include flash conversions. I checked my original purchase and found that I was eligible for a free upgrade from 1.9 to 2.0.

I am very pleased with the results of iSkysoft flash that I might write a post on the quality of it and the On2 encoder. The On2 Flix uses the vp6 encoder which is the same encoder used in Adobe Flash Pro. The problem is that if you want good results you need to have the On2 Flix Pro, which is about $200 or Adobe Pro which is over $500.