Category: Samantha

I’ve mentioned before my apprehension vis a vis the whole “terrible twos” things, though on balance I’d say that Sam has been a lot more mellow than we could have hoped for. In the last week or so, though, she has shown an escalating penchant for throwing hissy fits when she doesn’t get things her way. For example, the other day she took her shoe off and then demanded that ONLY Mommy could be the one to reattach it to her foot, despite the fact that we were in the middle of a 45-minute car trip to Nowhere, Missouri, Geralyn was driving, and there were like four other willing and able adults in the car with her. When Ger didn’t immediately release the wheel and lurch into the back seat to solve the footwear crisis, Sam started screaming her head off and could only be reasoned with by the power of the lollypop.

So to help alert care givers and innocent bystanders know when Sam is likely to launch into a fit, I’ve taken a page from the Department of Homeland Security’s play book and created the handy Samantha Alert System, which uses sophisticated facial topographical recognition technology (click for larger version):

Feel free to print that out and post it on your wall.

Here are some other pictures for your clicking pleasure:

I especially like Sam’s impersonation of the Swamp Thing, as well as her new appreciation for the daily newspaper.

Sam’s verbal skills continue to outstrip my wildest imagination, thanks in no small part to her habit of parroting practically everything she hears. We try to watch what we say. We really do. But even still, the following is still just a small sample of what we’ve actually heard Samantha repeat back:

• “I’m not gay.”
• “Ow, my crotch!”
• “Quit it, Jamie!”
• “Shut your word hole.”
• “No, The Internet is only 80 percent smut.”

Nobody told me that verbal development was such a Catch 22.

I often like to throw curve balls at Samantha. I mean, not literally, because I’m not that athletic, but when she and I are talking I often like to ask questions that I think may be just outside of her mental capabilities to answer. Take yesterday for example. I held up a stuffed dog and asked, “Sammy, what kind of animal is this?”

“That’s a dog!”

“Yes! That’s right! What kind of animal is Daddy?”

“No…. Daddy isn’t an animal. He a person.”

I was impressed. Somewhere along the line she had learned the idea that objects can belong to multiple classes. An orange and an apple are both round fruits, for example, but a ball can also be round without being a fruit. That kind of strutting down the path of psychological development really fascinates me.

And just as you might have expected, I started to beam like any slightly self-deluded father would. I mean, she also plays chess and the piano for crying out loud (though not well; I can still beat her at chess most games). Have I on my hands some kind of genius? Someone sprinting towards adult intelligence instead of waddling?

No, as it turns out. Apparently not.

Later that night when I gave Sam a bath I finished off the bubble bath bottle and threw it into the tub along with her other toys. A few minutes into the bath Sam took the cap from the bottle, scooped up a generous portion of soapy water and bubbles, and attempted to snort it all right up her nose while looking me square in the eye. This action was followed by the immediate reactions of choked coughing and the explosive expulsion of what seemed to be several cubic feet of Elmo’s Wet ‘n Wild Watermelon Bubble Bath from Sam’s sinus cavities. And apparently the makers of this fine bubble bath mixture put “For External Use Only” on the bottle because snorting it hurts like blue blazes despite the wonderfully fruity scent. So Sam was sputtering and crying and I was freaking out over the fact that she had just tried to inhale water, an act that tends to be taboo in most human cultures.

So that’s my Sammy: Generally a perpetrator of whit and sophistication studded by acts of inexplicable goof-balledness. She’s definitely her father’s daughter.

Here’s some pictures.

Let’s hope next week is a little better.

The Cool New Thing I’ve noticed about Sam this week is that she’s starting to make up little stories to entertain herself while playing with her cornucopia of toys. I really get a kick of out just sitting there and watching her make stuff up in a stream of childish consciousness. Tonight’s bathtime brought something like this when she got her Elmo, Cookie Monster, and two plastic frogs:

Elmo is walking Cookie Monster is walking jumping let’s go get on the train here’s the train Cookie Monster dropped something where did it go where did it go here it is he puts it in his pocket let’s go to the train oh HI FROGGY IT’S FROGGY let’s go to the train and Elmo is hop hop hop and he goes to the train AND NOW IT’S MY FOOT!^*

^*Translated from the Samineese.

Great stuff. Soon she’ll be able to write sitcom scripts for CBS. If my cam corder weren’t packed away with most of my other worldly possessions I’d get some audio. But alas.

Here’s some pictures.

So while Sam is learning how to talk, she’s not quite learning to be picky about when she discusses certain topics. The other night, Ger went out with her mother to a party, so Sam, Grandpa, and I went out to dinner together. With Mother’s Day coming up, we stopped in to a certain store so I could look at a couple of things I was considering getting Ger for the occasion. I made the mistake of telling Sam what was going on, which immediately elicited a nonstop torrent of “We buying Mommy a present! Where Mommy’s present go? Where Mommy’s present go?” No amount of shushing or cajoling would put a stop to this (rather one-sided) conversation. In fact, it just seemed to encourage her. The next day when I came home from work Ger gave me a sly smile and asked how the shopping had gone last night. I’m going to have to watch what I say around Sam.

…Either that or use her to disseminate false information and propaganda. Hmmmm, she may be useful yet.

Wow, what a week. The majority of it, though, was spent sans Samantha as Geralyn and I trekked halfway across the continent with our last carload of possessions while Sam stayed safely stuffed away at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Spending six days without Sam was kind of weird after all this time, and it struck me odd every time I’d omit a request for a high chair at a restaurant or shout a question to Geralyn in another room after 8:00 p.m. I was still able, however, to learn something new about my daughter despite the great gulf between us: She’s not a phone person. We’d call almost every night, and most conversations with Sam went like this:

GRANDMA: Here, I’ll put Sam on the line.

ME: Hi, Sammy!

[A loud “Ker-THUNK” sound from the other end]

GRANDMA: Well, she dropped the phone. Now she’s in the other room.

ME: Oh. Well, how many times has she pooped since we left?

Still, once we arrived at the end of our six day absence, I had the camera ready and Sam’s reaction was heartfelt and gleeful. It was kind of funny, really. She just kept saying “It’s Mommy! It’s Daddy!” between bouts of bubbling laughter. Soon we were all doing it together.

Here’s some pictures:

Even in the small amount of time we were apart, I swear Sam has grown and changed noticeably. For one, she’s much more loquacious. I was just sitting with her while she did her business in the bathroom and she erupted into this huge, rambling talk about the toy train Ger’s parents had dug up from the basement for her.

“It has a red train and a blue train and a red train and a green train,” she said, staring me right in the eyes and furrowing her brow like she was imparting vital information necessary for the safety of all mankind. Then, as an afterthought, she added “The train goes ‘Toot Toot’ when I press the button.”

“Wow,” I said. “Is there a yellow train car, too?”

Sam looked at me like I had just asked the stupidest question imaginable. “NO. It has a red train and a blue train and a red train and a blue train. And green train.” Again, she was making direct eye contact throughout, but this time I just decided to sit there and listen to her thesis while nodding at what I hoped were the appropriate points.

Finally after repeating all this about five times, she fixed me with one more stern look and said. “It goes ‘Toot toot’ when I press it.” That was good enough for me.

So, excited as we are to encourage Sam’s verbal development, there are times when we wish she’d keep it down a little. To wit: in church. We went to the grandparents’ church this morning. It’s nice place cut out of stone with lots of marble and other hard surfaces that produce an impressive echo chamber (yes, I’m aware of the irony here, thank you). In an effort to keep Sam quiet, we had brought her one of her new favorite books, How Mother Animals Love their Babies. Each page has a different animal and the baby creatures talk about how their mommies take care of them.

Thing is, Sam has gotten to the point where she’s memorizing the words for each page, and will say them out loud, often at the highest volume her diminutive frame will allow. So we had the following impromptu exchange during the church service:

PRIEST: As we prepare to contemplate the divine mystery, let us call to mind our sins…

SAMANTHA: MY MOMMY IS A BEAVER!

Honestly, I wasn’t aware that such a thing was really a sin, but I grew up Southern Baptist and they berated me for stranger things, so what the heck.

So, anyway …have I mentioned that we’re moving? Leaving sunny Southern California? Trekking over halfway across the country to take a great new job, be closer to family, and stay one step ahead of all the stalkers^* out there on the Internet? No? Well, I’ve been meaning to mention it but just haven’t had time with all the commotion. It’d be kind of hard, however, to talk about Week #117 without letting that cat out of the bag.

We spent the whole week, in fact, house hunting in our soon-to-be-new home town. We decided to make things endlessly easier on ourselves by stopping off en route to our new destination and dropping Sam off with Ger’s parents, who were more than happy to keep her safe. Furthermore, Sam remained there when her parental units made the jaunt back to San Diego to oversee the packers and movers, then stuff our their remaining possessions into a 2005 Honda Odyssee minivan that they will drive across many hundreds of miles. At some point we’re going to have to stop by and pick up Sam, but it won’t be until near the end of the trip. I love my little girl dearly, but strapping her into a car seat for the better part of four days is the kind of exercise in masochism that I think everyone would just as soon avoid.

So we’re going to miss Southern California. In many ways I associate this place with Samantha. It’s where she was conceived, where she was born, and where she has lived her whole life. So many of my thoughts and memories about Ger’s pregnancy, Sam’s birth, and Sam’s first 2+ years are inexorably tied to memories of palm trees, beaches, beautiful weather, cheap avocados (three for a dollar!), and everything else that California is. It’s hard to think of one without thinking of the other. She’s my California girl.

As a concrete example of what I’m talking about, I got up this morning and went into Sam’s nursery to begin the systematic obliteration of every trace of her from the room. All the pictures and the wooden cutouts of her initials came off the walls. I pulled down her yellow and pink curtains. I disassembled her mobile and folded up her quilt. Later, when the movers arrived, all her stuffed animals, clothes, books, and toys went into ugly little cardboard boxes. Then, as a final act of nullification, I laid down a tarp and painted over the lavender and yellow walls with a pure, neutral white.

This made me kind of sad. That’s the only room I’ve ever known Sam to have. With it gone –and with her gone at the moment– it’s kind of like she’s without a home, without an anchor, without a familiar place where she can feel safe and absolutely sure of herself. And worse yet’ I’m the one who has taken it away from her. It’s not just me, is it? Isn’t that a little sad?

Still, we’ll make new memories. Ones just as good. And we’ll have a new home …one with a 52-inch high definition TV. And maybe guard towers with rocket launchers and a big button on the top that when you press it it says “COBRA is attacking the base! Battle stations! BRRRAAAA-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!”

Cool.

Oh, before I forget, here’s a few pictures. Not many given the circumstances, and I’m not sure how many I’ll be able to snap for next week’s update, but we’ll see.

^*If you are an Internet stalker and want to get our new home address and a schedule of our comings and goings, just, uh, e-mail me with your name, phone number, address, and the name of your parole officer. I’ll get in touch.

Happy Easter! This morning we learned an important lesson about this most blessed of all holidays: Don’t let your toddler eat her weight in chocolate as soon as she wakes up. Actually, we didn’t mean to, but she was just so fast. We set Sam down in front of her Easter basket and in the few seconds it took me to get the camera ready she shrieked “Ooh, candy!” had completely mauled her collection of chocolate eggs, jelly beans, and malted milk balls. As I write this she’s running around downstairs, completely strung out on sugar and yammering nonstop at her entourage of stuffed bunnies about how much “Sammy likes candy.”

Last week I mentioned that Sam had started to sing songs. This week I got some audio for you. It is, in fact, the first single from her debut album, Incoherent Babblings Sparsely Punctuated by Cute Songs. Also, she talks about Snakes on a Plane. Enjoy:

I’m a Little Tea Pot
Snakes on a Plane

Here’s some pictures:

As you can see, Sam seems to have had a pretty good time at her Easter egg hunt, though she took time out to pose for a group picture with friends Risa, Sabrina, and Renna. I also like this picture, which suggests that Sam is preparing for a life of lounging around all day, then getting all dressed up to grab a drink and go clubbing late into the night (which, for her, is like 7:15 p.m.).

Finally, my continuing research has discovered another thing that Samantha is scared of: snails. We’ve recently had a lot of rain here, and yesterday Sam and I were playing in the back yard when I noticed an abundance of the slimy little invertebrates. We made a game of it where I found as many as I could (which ended up being 15 or so), picked them up, and put them up on the wooden fence. Once they started coming back out of their shells and waving their eye stalks around in a kind of “What the heck just happened?” way, Sam got a good look at them and started whimpering. So add snails to the list of things that scare her, which already includes dolphins, piggy banks, the Pacific Ocean, and The Wal-Mart Picture Studio.

That’s it for this week. Fair warning for next week: the update may be a little bit late due to some unavoidable circumstances, but it’ll get up eventually. Just keep clicking the Refresh button on your browser until it does.

I’ve mentioned before about Sam’s possessiveness, and it’s a trait that seems intent on persisting. The other night Geralyn was baking a cake for her “Mom’s Night Out” club, a delicious cake that Sam and I had been forbidden from even thinking about touching. This didn’t prevent Sam from sitting in the living room and repeatedly commenting that “Mommy is making a cake for Sammy.” When the oven timer went off, Sam gave a little squeak of joy and shouted “Ooh, my cake is done!” There was much pouting when we weren’t given any. Sam was upset, too.

We’re trying to kind of go with the flow in regards to this whole independence thing, though. We’re leaving the safety gates open and giving the kid free range of the house, but watching her come down the stairs by herself still turns me into a cringing, twitchy ball of apprehension. We’ve also started giving her time alone in the bath. Before we would practically straddle the ledges of the tub and squat over her, arms curled into protective claws and held ready to snatch her out of the deadly suds if she so much as looked like she was going to tip over. Now we still stay nearby, but check in on her every minute or two while keeping a sharp ear out for thumps, splashes, or gurgles.

Here, I got a lot of pictures this week:

On Saturday we spent the day with The Northcutts in Carlsbad, California. We made a quick stop in The Flower Fields where we took a picture or two, but I’ve got enough pics from that to do a whole separate post for the photo section. The balance of the day was spent at a nearby beach, which gave us a bunch of great photo ops, too.

Sam had been to the beach once or twice before, but this is pretty much the first time we took her down to the water. She was kind of delighted at first, then apprehensive, then completely untrusting of the giant body of water that is the Pacific Ocean. I think the latter might have happened because one particularly strong wave rushed up around her ankles right as she fell down, soaking her entire left side.

Finally, you may notice the decapitated and scalped rabbit head with green grass brains which was the horrific centerpiece of Sam’s Easter egg hunt. Ger put this monstrosity in the laundry closet to get it out of the way while we cleaned house, and I just about had a heart attack when I opened the closet door to find it sitting on the shelf at eye level and staring out at me with its maniac gaze. Still gives me the shivers.

In closing for this week, I’ll mention that Sam has hit yet another momentous milestone: she has learned to sing a song. Now, I know about that special brand of insanity that prompts parents to strut and crow about vicarious achievements that the rest of the world sees as banal at best and would-you-just-shut-up-please at worst. It’s just that when Sam stands there and sings the entire “I’m a Little Tea Pot” song —complete with hand gestures, I tell you— I can’t keep myself from bursting into moronic laughter of pride and glee. She just has that kind of effect on me.

Here it is at week 114 and Sam’s individuality and desire for freedom is definitely starting to shine through. We went to Legoland this last weekend and made the mistake of giving her too much sugar. After consuming her own weight in brownies, ice cream, cookies, and spicy shrimp linguini, Sam took one more look at the vibrant primary colors surrounding her and went completely ballistic. One second she was holding my hand, the next she was shrieking with pure, undulating glee and running full speed while flailing her arms like the pace setter in the 4th Annual Epileptic’s 5K Fun Run.

That aside, Legoland was actually pretty neat. I normally loathe theme parks (paying $125 to get in then waiting 45 minutes for a 27-second ride doesn’t seem like the best use of a Saturday to me), but we had free passes and the park had a delightful play area for toddlers where you just kind up dump them in there and let them run riot. We also squeezed in a few rides, like an airplane ride (“Oooh, I want to ride in the yellow one!”) and a helicopter ride (“Mommy and Sammy go really, really high!”). Legoland’s focus on public transportation also included a train ride and a boat ride, but I’ll put up pictures of those in a separate post. I got a lot of pictures as it is:

I particularly like this one of Sam inspecting a Lego elf sculpture like she were a distinguished Parisian taking a stroll through the Louvre. I guess that when you’re a kid, everything made of brightly colored, interlocking blocks is fine art.

The last thing I thought I’d mention is that while Sam seems pretty adaptive and not prone to having fits when we stumble around outside of her normal routine, she did experience something last night that really upset her. She had taken down this shiny silver piggy bank –the kind actually shaped like a pig– and was hefting it around while Ger ran her bath. The thing was chock full of quarters and probably weighed two or three pounds, so of course Sam lost control and dropped it. Upon impact, the screw that held the two bank halves together came disengaged and the thing split apart, sending quarters everywhere. The sight of her piggie busting open and spraying its silvery guts all over the bathroom really freaked Sam out and she erupted into burbling, hysterical tears. Like I’ve said before, she’s very particular about her things and this really seemed to upset her. Fortunately, she was easily calmed down when we gathered the coins and fit the bank halves back together. The only lasting effect seemed to be that throughout her bath she would occasionally mutter to herself, “My pig broke. My pig broke. My pig broke.” Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday some psychologist identifies this as the reason she can’t use spare change to buy bacon from a vending machine.

Kind of a slow week, actually. Sam continues to chat us up, and things are getting to the point where you can actually have rudimentary little conversations with her. Sometimes she’ll actually get the ball rolling by making spontaneous observations like “I like cheese” even though cheese was nowhere on either the conversational or literal landscape.

The funniest thing, though, has got to be what I’ve taught Sam in relation to one particularly weird Internet meme:

ME: Sammy, what movie do you want to see?

SAM: Snakes on a Plane! Snakes on a Plane!

If you don’t get it, don’t worry. You’re just dead inside. Picture Samuel Jackson screaming at terrified flight attendants about snakes: “I want these **********ing snakes off the **********ing plane! Now!” And you’ll get it, or close enough.

Here, here’s some pictures:

One other odd linguistic quirk that Sam has developed is constantly asking where people and/or things have gone. I think it started in earnest when I was playing hide-and-seek with her one night. I’d put her on the bed, then run out of the room and hide in one of the other upstairs room by the time she clamored down. She’d run out into the room and into the hallway, where she’d shout “Where Daddy go?” before starting to systematically check each room until she found me. Fun stuff.

Thing is, she’s developed a habit of posing this kind of question when the answer is completely self evident. This leads to conversations like this:

“Where did my doo go?”

“Your blanket it right behind you, Sammy. I just watched you drop it.”

“Where did Mommy go?”

“She’s upstairs.”

“Where Wolfgang go?”

“I have no idea. He’s probably hiding from you somewhere.”

“Where did Mommy go”

“Upstairs. Still. You should write these things down.”

“Where did Daddy go?”

“Um, helloooo? I’m right here. You’re looking right at me.”

Sam pauses here to give me an annoyed look.

“Where did my doo go?”

And so on. We never did find the cat.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve raved about Sam’s developing language skills, so I think I’m due. They have, as you may have guessed, continued to rocket upwards, with complete sentences now being the norm. She’s also making deft use of pronouns, which I thought was kind of unusual for her age. She still sometimes says “Sammy” (or rather “Harm-ee”) when referring to herself, but she’ll just as often say “me” or “my” or “I” or even “you” when refering to someone else. Apparently Elmo with his constant self-referential syndrome is not the perfect model upon which to mold expectations for a kid’s language development.

Below are some of Sam’s more recent and most elaborate vocalizations. The first one came totally out of the blue while we were just sitting on the floor, playing:

“I had a black rocking chair at Nana’s house.”

Which, it turns out, is true. Then there was this one when we getting dressed to go play in the back yard:

“Daddy needs shoes! [Looks at my feet] Oh, they’re already on.”

And then there’s this, her current coup de grace, said while eating a particularly messy lunch:

“Uh oh, cheese all over the floor. …That’s okay, momma will clean it up.”

Sam has also gotten into the habit of repeating just about everything we say, even when we’re not talking to her. This has made us quite self-conscious, and we’re dreading the day when Sam catches an errant F-bomb and lobs it right back at us. Geralyn and I have had some lively arguments about which one of us is most likely to be the perpetrator of this ugly bit vocabulary building when it happens, but these aren’t arguments I want to extend to this public space. So I won’t say much, except that one of us curses like a longshoreman on vacation in Deadwood when she overcooks Sam’s cream of wheat and it boils over inside the microwave. I’m just sayin’.

Now, pictures!

We’re still a little skimpy on pictures on account of not being in our normal routine, but things will pick up next week. The picture in the middle is of Sam wearing her lucky St. Patrick’s Day hat. Personally, I think she got ripped off when she bought that thing. It looks like somebody just stapled some strips of construction paper together and went at them with crayons. But what do I know?

As I’ve mentioned, Sam has become quite possessive of her things lately, and we’re working on getting her to share with others. And I’m sorry to say that this week she took the lessons to heart –or rather, to stomach– and decided to share some kind of horrible flu bug with everyone she came in contact with.

It started quietly enough. Sam contracted the virus, then started throwing up and, well, you know …projecting from the other end, too. This was while she and Ger were still in San Diego and planning to come out for my dad’s funeral. Sam seemed to be better after a day and a half so they went ahead and came out, but then Ger started ralphing on Sunday night and was totally knocked off her feet the whole day Monday. Then Monday night I caught it and spent the whole night vomiting so violently that the neighbors probably thought I was strangling a moose in the bathroom. Then I had to fly back to California on Tuesday by myself, completely exhausted, dehydrated (none of us could keep even water down), and nauseous the whole way. Then I heard that my brother-in-law and my father-in-law both caught it and were repeating the hurl-and-squirt routine. From there, I’m sure the bug is infecting every member of the Madigan, Warren, Smith, and Sommer families that came in town for the funeral. I hope my dad will look down on me and forgive me for saying that for the first time in a long time, he was the only one who wasn’t sick.

At any rate, BAD SHARING, Sammy! BAD!

Here are some pictures.

Not much, since the travel and other activities put a crimp in our normally compulsive picture taking. The one on the right is Sam with her “Aun Hawn.” Who is, as I write this, probably vomiting as a result of being close enough to Sam to pose for that picture.

I’ve written before about how I thought Sam was getting into the “Terrible Twos” a little ahead of schedule, but it now appears that my pronouncement may have been a little premature. I apparently had no idea what “terrible” really meant.

Sam is still sweet as aspertane and I love her to death, but she’s really started to display some of those hallmark signs of independence that are, I guess, normal parts of development at this age. Can’t have pudding for dinner? To the floor! Kick! Scream! Need a diaper change? Kick! Squirm! See if you can make Daddy cry! The other trait that Sam has developed along these is possessiveness. She has learned the concept of possession, and we’re still working on sharing. In dealing with this kind of thing, though, the snarky part of me has learned to play off it to funny results. Take this recent conversation in my parent’s back yard as a for-example:

“That’s a nice stick,” I say. “Can I see it?”

Sam pulls the stick away and gives me the evil eye. “Mah sick!”

“Your stick? Okay, I’m going to play with this ball, then.”

“No! Mah ball!” She grabs the ball, still refusing to relinquish the stick.

“Oh,” I say, looking around. “I guess I’ll play with this fire truck.”

Sam grimaces on queue and lurches for the truck, still clutching stick and ball. “Mah fah tuck!”

“Okay, I guess I’ll just amuse myself with these pine cones.”

“No! Mah pah co” She’s now toddling around under the combined weight of a stick, a fire truck, a ball, and three or four pine cones. She keeps dropping various items and snatching them up again lets I make a grab for them.

At this point I have an inspiration. “Ooh, Sammy, look at this tree I’ve got.” I walk over to a tree and put my arm around a sufficiently large piece of the local flora.

Sam makes some kind of frantic noise from behind the pine cones and runs for the tree. Only she can’t see around her accumulated possessions so well, and she walks right into it, sending everything flying in all directions. I try not to laugh too much and remind myself that someday Sam will probably find a way to get even with me. Then we have a talk about sharing, which she ignores. There’s some kind of moral here, but it involves a kid running into a tree, so I’m not sure it’ll catch on.

Pictures!

I particularly love this one, which shows Sam inspecint a newly washed glass for spots. Some day she’ll make a fine waitress –in one of those fancy joints that don’t have any pictures of the food on the menus.

Not much to say this week given that Sam’s “Papa,” my father, is gravely ill and in the hospital. Sam has handled things much better than the rest of us –I’m constantly surprised by her easy going nature and adaptability. Here’s some pictures:

One of the things I love about kids (well, my kid, anyway) is that something as ordinary as a pile of leaves becomes the subject of great glee when you just run through them. It also gave me a chance to play around with some different camera settings, like using a slow shutter speed to blur the action or a fast shutter speed to freeze it and suspend dozens of leaves in the air for easy inspection.

Again, sorry for the short update, but hopefully things will be normal again soon.

Valentine’s day was earlier in the week and Sam seemed to enjoy it. There was a heart-shaped cake, gifts from both sets of Grandparents and one Aunt, a Valentine’s Day card exchange at the Mommy & Me class (Elmo, Dora, and strangely enough that stoner Spongebob Squarepants seem to be the favorites this year), and a balloon. I didn’t get her anything, though. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be for lovers and I’m really not sure where this idea of giving Valentine’s Day gifts to children came from. Hippies, probably. Communist, capitalistic hippies working at Hallmark and/or Nickelodeon.

Pictures!

As you can see, we took Sam to feed the ducks at the park near our house. Now, you need to understand that these ducks are rough. During an earlier trip to this park, Ger and I walked around a bend to find three ducks blocking the path. They just stood there and looked at us with their cold, dead eyes. We took a couple steps back and turned around, only to see three more ducks waddle out from behind some bushes and trap us. We had to give up all our bread.

And indeed, these ducks were like little bulls when they saw that Sam had bread. One of them kept pecking me on the butt to get my attention. I was kind of afraid that Sam might freak out, but she thought the honking swarm of feathers and webbed feet around her was a hoot. Indeed, she walked right up to them and flung food right in their faces. I plan on letting more bread go bad so we can go back.

I know I’ve gone on and on about this in recent weeks, but every week I’m amazed all over again at how quickly Sam’s language skills are growing. And I doubt it’s just her –from what I’ve read, most kids go through a linguistic blitzkrieg at this age. Sam continues to parrot words and sounds back at us, and she’ll even do the same with the television set or other people out in public. What’s amazing is her hit rate with using new words correctly. It’s not like she’s saying “purple monkey dishwasher” the first time she decides to ask for help working the latch on her new bath toy. She says “Daddy help boat, please,” which is a sentence that she has never, ever said nor even heard before. How did she do that? The human mind is so frickin’ cool.

Actually, she doesn’t say “Daddy help boat, please.” That may be what it sounds like in her head, but what comes out is actually closer to “Dadda hep bow pees.” She has also developed a habit of inserting a little “Hmmmm” sound to serve as a placeholder when she doesn’t know the word for something. This leads to requests like “Mama hmmmm pees” that send us into a long series of inquiries trying to figure out what she wants. Cup? Doll? Yogurt? Ball? Socialized medicine?

These little scraps of Samineese are a language that only Sam, Ger, and I seem to speak fluently, though I’ve noticed that other parents can sometimes make pretty good guesses, too. To test your own Samineese fluency, I’ve prepared this little game where you try to match “What is said” on the left with “What is meant” on the right. I’ve done the first one, “Doo” for you. Grab a black permanent marker and do the rest by just drawing directly on your computer moniter.

The answers are at the bottom of this news post. Don’t cheat!

In the meantime, here’s some pictures:

As you can see, Sam has learned to eat a banana by herself, though she has yet to learn how not to run while eating that banana so that it doesn’t break in half and falls to the floor and gets cat hair all over it. But furry bananas aside, with Sam’s illness long gone, her apetite has returned to make up for lost time. Saturday morning I watched in shocked fascination as she ate a whole banana, a fist full of Cheerios, a cup of creamed wheat (with raisins), half a cup of applesauce, and about six or eight grapes. She then wiped her mouth, looked me in the eye, and said “Yo-guh” like a thirsty cowboy demanding wiskey from the barkeep in a John Wayne movie. So I brought her about half a cup of yogurt and set it down quickly, lest I draw back a stump. When she was done, Sam set the spoon down, belched loudly, and asked to be let down so she could run around and burn all those calories off. Why didn’t anyone tell me kids ate this much?

And now the answers to the Samineese Challenge:

How did you do?

One of my favorite things about parenthood is watching my kid evolve and turn into a bona fide little person capable of reason, emotion, curiosity, empathy, humor, and desire. And now I get to add one more word to that laundry list of traits: guile.

Sam has become quite the sly little fox in the last couple of weeks. Ger told me about an episode where Sam wanted to go upstairs (“oopah gate!” means “open the gate blocking the stairs!” by the way) but Ger was busy with something at the moment. After giving it some thought, Sam came over to Ger and said “Pee-pee!” which is what we’re trying to teach her to tell us when she needs to use the bathroom. Deciding that this was a much more dire request, Ger dropped what she was doing and took Sam upstairs to her bathroom. Only once she crested the stairs, Sam ran right past the bathroom, heading instead to her bedroom where she could retrieve a stack of books. These she gave to Ger so she could read them, which had been her aim all along. Pee-pee indeed. Pee-pee like a fox.

Thing is, we’ve kind of caught on to this kind of duplicity now, but Sam hasn’t caught on to the fact that we’ve caught on. Coupled with her growing rebelliousness and rapidly escalating language skills, this leads to some interesting conversations like this one:

“Hi, Sammy, what are you –AHH! OW! That hurt! Am I bleeding? Sammy, take a time out!”

“No!”

“Yes! Go, go stand against the wall and take a time out.”

“Pee-Pee! Poo-Poo!”

“Ha. Nice try. If you need to go, you can go after your time out.”

“Ree?”

“I’ll read to you after your time out. Stand against the wall.”

“No-no-no!”

“Yes, Samantha. Take your time out.”

“Gook?”

“Grapes? Why do you want grapes?”

“Gook, pees?”

“That’s very nice, but no, not even if you say please.”

“Doo.”

“No blankets during time out. Stand against the wall.”

“La-la pop!”

“You’ve got to be kidding. No. Take your time out, Samantha.”

“Pee-pee!”

We went on like this for quite some time. The attitude I’ve taken, though, is that I’ve got more patience than she does, and the only way to win these battles it to outlast her. Sometimes I pack a sack lunch and a sleeping bag, because while eventually effective, this tactic can take a while.

Here’s some pictures. Sam often wears a kind of a bland expression in front of the camera, but this week I seem to catch her being more expressive for some reason.

I’m not the only one who has fun conversations with Sam, though. Here’s one that took place between Sam and Ger:

“Sammy, what should we have for dinner?”

“Cake!”

“Haha! Funny, but seriously –what do you want for dinner?”

“Eet eet cake! Eet eet cake!”

That’s what my daughter is doing with the gift of language. Trying to weasel out of punishment and get treats when she doesn’t deserve them. She’ll make a marvelous Senator some day.

This hasn’t been a very good week for Sammy. When I left for work this morning she standing in the middle of the living room, wailing like a baby banshee and wiping at the hot tears that were streaking down her cheeks. She was inconsolable, no matter what we tried, and had been like that on and off for the last several days.

Let’s back up before I tell you why, though. The first part of the week was actually great. We had the birthday party on Sunday, and Sam even got a second dose of festivity on Monday at the Mommy & Me class, though she looks pretty apathetic even at the tender age of two. On Wednesday Ger and I fed her more cake and opened the gifts she had received in the mail from family. At the end of the night she sat astride another pile of birthday booty, including bath toys, books, a bubble bucket, and personal checks (the last of which are going straight into her savings). Her Aunt Shawn had even arranged for a special, 30-second phone call from Elmo (or his understudy, we don’t know for sure), the first 20 seconds of which Sam spent looking at the phone in confusion, the last 10 seconds of which she finally caught on and got into it.

One of Sam’s favorite birthday presents, though, came from Grandma and Grandpa: a shopping cart and baby doll that you can see here (also a rare picture of Sam with her hair in pigtails). Sam is totally into the doll (which Ger named “Francine” after the mom in American Dad for some reason), and loves to feed her breakfast. And snacks. And lunch. And more snacks.

Here are some pictures:

But back to the inconsolable crying and hot tears. Around Thursday Sam started to get sick. It wasn’t much at first, but by the weekend she was running a nasty temperature (climbing as high as 104° before we pounded it back down with Tylenol) and she seemed to be in a perpetually bad mood. I think she had a sore throat, too, because when she tried to eat I could see her grimace with every swallow. So of course she practically stopped eating, which probably didn’t do much to improve her mood. She’d often just stand there, blubbering and crying “Oh no, no, no! Oh no, no, no! Oh no, no, no!” over and over again, as if that repeated negation might make her misery depart for some other place. But it didn’t, and neither did most of what we did for her. Every offer of food, drink, or toys was met with immediate and sometimes spastic rejection. Occasionally we could get her calmed down enough to watch Sesame Street or one of her DVDs, but eventually she’d rev back up and would start crying and chanting “Oh no, no, no!” again.

We actually thought Sam was doing better by the time we put her to bed last night, but she woke up at 5:40 a.m. (a good hour and a half early for her) and started crying. I was already up and Ger decided to just go ahead and get Sam up, too, since she was whimpering through the baby monitor. When the blinds were opened and Sam saw that it was still dark outside, she did a little freak out of her own. This condition of the Earth’s rotation TOTALLY pissed her off for some reason, and she started up in earnest again, screaming at the pre-dawn outside her window. Finally I just put her back in her crib and she lay there semi-quietly until light began to leak through her curtains and the world was right again. For about 20 minutes, anyway. To make matters worse, Ger seems to have the same illness.

During one of Sam’s fits I consulted our “What to Expect the Toddler Years” book to see what it had to say on the topics of fever and malady in general. I swear, sometimes I think that the author of this thing just copied and pasted “This is normal. Your child will be fine.” to every chapter of the book, because apparently everything is just to be expected and you should just be calm. What I want to do when I have some free time is to write a book called “What not to Expect.” Pages 2-500 of this book will be the subject index in the back, covering every conceivable condition or circumstance from “Asthma” to “Zebra Poisoning.” Every entry in this subject index would reference Page 1 of the book, which will just have the following in big, bold letters:

What? Are you kidding? YOU NEED TO FREAK OUT! RIGHT NOW!

Because sometimes when your daughter is already way ahead of you, you just want permission to freak out. It could be good to freak out, but you can’t. Because that’s not your job. But it would be good to be a temp on assignment to that project for a while.

Dear Samantha, Today you’re two years old. Nice job! Like I did last year, I thought I’d write you a letter and tell you how things went this second year. Again, I don’t think you can read this yet unless you’re some kind of super genius and are just messing with us, but some day you will. At around 12 months you really started taking notice of the world. You would point at things and shout “DAT?” as if to say “Hey? What’s that? I’ve never seen one of those before!” Dat, dat, dat! Later this engagement moved on to not just pointing, but pointing and laughing with delight. One of the things I’ve come to love most about you is that you laugh so easily. It seems like everything is JUST SO AWESOME and you can’t help busting out in a belly laugh at things that the rest of us consider mundane. Teddy bear fell off the table? Hysterical! Daddy peeks out at you from underneath a blanket? Bust a gut! Your mother and I share your afinity for laughter, but you’re really reminded us that the world is full of things to be happy about. I’ve also found out other things about you. For example, you have no preference for chedder over swiss cheese. You absolutely love Sesame Street, particularly Elmo and Cookie Monster. Sleeping and eating are two of your core competencies, but when you’re awake you want to move. You never sit still unless it’s to read or watch TV. Even then, you’ll kind of stand in front of the TV and do this little side-to-side dance. And then there’s the talking. A little after your first birthday you started yammering, and within a few weeks you were actually making sense. Sometimes. After the obligatory “Mommy” and “Daddy” you moved on to animal sounds. Actually, even though you’re currently mastering short sentences and polysylabic words like “Umbrella” or “Costco,” you still to this day refer to ducks as “Quack Quacks” and the cat as “Rower-rower.” You’ll need to work on that before your college entrance exams. Locomotion was also a big theme this year. You started toddling around on your own around week 59, though you were pulling up and “cruising” well before then. Toddling gave way to walking which gave way to running and running gave way to OH MY GOD SHE’S CLIMBED THE STAIRS WHILE WE WEREN’T LOOKING! So proud. On the flipside, one of the less pleasant results of your burgeoning (a word which here means “making daddy proud”) independence is the need for some discipline from me and your mom. At first you’d pretty much go along with it and quit doing whatever we told you to quit doing, but in the last few months you’ve decided that maybe we shouldn’t have the last word on the subject and that you should just do whatever you like. Frustrating as it is, I understand that it’s just a normal part of learning to navigate the wold and I’m not going to hold it against you. Because some day, when you’re an adult, you may have a very fulfilling career smearing dirty fingers across the television or standing up in the bathtub. And while we’re on the subject, tantrums are also creeping into your arsenal of responses to situations you don’t like, and you’re not beyond letting one fly, even at the library. “Go!” has been one of your favorite words lately, as evidenced by your repeatedly shrieking whenever you’re bored with the current little plot of the world in your purview, but I guess that’s understandable. It’s a huge world and you’re just now developing the means to experience it. You want to move on. I can respect that, kiddo. I may snap at you, but don’t hold it against me either. We’re both just doing our jobs. But at any rate, you’ve definitely become more of a person these last 12 months. You’re no longer this little crying thing that just needs changing, feeding, and attention. You still need all those things, I guess, but in the last year you’ve started to become your own person. And I certainly like who I see you becoming. The best part of my day is still coming home to you, and I still think about you while I’m away. So thanks again, Samantha. Thanks for taking me through this second year of your life. You’ve changed a lot, and I think I have, too. Some of it has been stressful and some things will never be the same, but it’s nice to have you there to help me through it all. You’re a natural. Love, –Dad

Want to send Samantha a quick “Happy 2nd Birthday” note? Shoot an e-mail to samantha.madigan@gmail.com.

The big event this week was Sam’s 2nd birthday part, which you can see pictures of right here and read a little about over here. It was quite fun (Ger worked hard to make sure it would be) and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. And Sam scored some phat loot.

Sam’s mastery over life has started to take a big step: she’s learning letters. Well, a few of them. Right now she knows two members of the alphabetical family: O and K. So if she ever wants to mail a package to Nana and Pa-Pa in Oklahoma, she’s partway there. If she sees these two characters written anywhere, she’ll scream “OH!” or “KAY!” sometimes several times in a row, no matter where we are. It’s kind of cute, but I hope she decides to give the rest of the alphabet a try, too. I hear “W” is frickin’ awesome.

Part of her interest in the alphabet may be that we read to Sam constantly, and last Saturday I decided to take her to the new library that just opened up the road. We wandered through the stacks where she would rip down a pile of books, select one (usually one with a bear or cars on the cover), deposit herself in my lap, and insist that I read it to her. After a while I had a armload of books she seemed to like and went to the circulation desk to apply for a library card. Around this time Sam decided that she had had enough and that it was time to remind me that she was entering into the terrible twos. She grabbed my hand and said “Go,” as she is wont to do when she’s ready to move on. When we did not in fact “go” immediately, she squared her feet, scrunched her face, and started screaming “GO GO GO! GO GO GO! GO GO GO!” as loud as she could. Which, for the record, sounds a LOT louder when you’re in a library.

So we went, sans library card and thus sans books. And though there were stern words once we got outside, there was also juice, a Snack Trap™ full of grapes, and a trip to the park. Yes, my discipline is terrible to behold. Here are some pictures:

As you can see, Sam has finally begun to master the art of drinking through a straw. Her reluctance to do so had caused me no small amount of anxiety for some reason. I mean, potty training and complete sentences could wait, I wanted to know why this kid couldn’t suck apple juice through a straw.

I put some pictures from Sam’s second birthday party yesterday on the Photos Page. And because I like you, I’ll save your tired mouse clicking finger some work and post them here, too:

We had a great turnout, with just about everyone we invited being able to make it and bring along their kids. There was Gabriel, Rachel, Emma and brother Henry, Kylie, and sisters Renna and Risa. (Deep apologies for not getting good shots of Rachel or Henry. Sorry, parents!)

Everybody seemed to have a great time, so much so that an impromptu wrestling match broke out. Also, there was baloons and cake.