Month: November 2004

Blogging Baby, one of the websites I read regularly, had a contest to give away some really nice diaper bags from Skip Hop. All you had to do was tell a story about a particularly horrendous diaper change. With such a fertile (ha ha) subject, I had to give it a shot. Well, I won one of the ten bags they gave away! Apparently there are people who appreciate life’s better moments, like having your daughter fill her car seat an inch deep while on a three hour flight.

If you’re so inclined, you can read the whole story here.

BIG week this week. The kind that make for great mini-series on the Lifetime network if they’d ever return my calls. As I mentioned last week, we took Sam on a three city World Tour this week, covering San Diego, Houston, and Tulsa.

The first leg was the easiest, even if it happen on the busiest travel day of the year when only CRAZY people would take a 10-month old on a three hour ride in a metal tube with two hundred other people. Fortunately, we arrived at the airport like 98 hours ahead of time and only suffered a slight delay due to weather. Allow me to point something out for other travelers, though: if you suddenly lean your chair back all the way back, drilling the person behind you in the head with the little tray table latch, then you deserve to have a baby position herself behind your right ear and play with a toy that goes CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. For an hour. Jerk.

Sam actually did pretty well on the flight, even though she’s at the age where sitting still is anathema to the entire Platonic idea of a 10-month old baby. She entertained herself mostly by standing up in my lap and grabbing at the toupe belonging to the guy in front of us. We had to change her diaper twice in the tiny airplane bathroom, but it wasn’t too bad. At first I was concerned that she would fall off the changing table, but I quickly realized that the worst that she could do would be to kind of lean. Slightly.

When we arrived in Houston we were greeted by my sister Shawn and brother-in-law Nicholas Cage. Sorry, I mean Bent. I must pause here to say that just between you and me, their house is frickin’ awesome. They have designer squirrels in the back yard and everything. We were stationed in the East Wing, with Sam in her own room for the night. This worked out well, as she had skipped her afternoon nap in favor of shouting at tray tables and grabbing at strangers’ hair.

The stay was a short one, though, as we went to bed and got up to drive to Tulsa so that we could spend Thanksgiving with my parents. I repeatedly explained to my sister that scientific research has shown that merely having a baby in the car adds 20% to the time it takes to make a trip. It’s like they warp space or something. I think I saw a nerd in a wheelchair talk about it once and there were neat 3-D graphs. Shawn refused to believe me at first, but in the end it took us about 10 hours in the car to make the 8-hour drive. Call M.I.T. if you need help with the math.

Upon arriving in Tulsa, we immediately had to go shopping for diapers, having depleted our meager reserves. Ger and I stood under the buzzing, halogen lights at Tulsa’s finest grocery store and argued over how big a bag we should buy with our limited luggage space. We eventually decided to get the big bag and at the end of the trip shove the leftovers into whatever cavities we could find like the cocaine mules we always hear about on the San Diego evening news. There’s some great irony at work there, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Sam’s sleep schedule wasn’t thrown off too badly by the travel and new time zones, though it didn’t go perfectly smoothly, either. I’ve heard weird tales of synchronization where if you put two cells from a human heart next to each other, they’ll begin pulsing in time. And we’ve all heard the one about women living in the same house getting on the same schedule, if you know what I mean (Sam, if you’re reading this twelve years later in life and in fact don’t know what I’m talking about, ask your mother; I only agreed to talk to you about not smoking or smuggling crack cocaine). In this instance, this larger phenomenon manifested itself when my Dad and Sam got on almost the same exact sleep schedules. Get up at the same time, morning nap at the same time, afternoon nap at the same time, go to bed at the same time. It was kind of eerie.

Nap times were easy, but going to bed at night was complicated by having to share a room with Sam. Outside of trips like this, Sam hasn’t slept in the same room as us since we came home from the hospital, so none of us was used to it. The result was that when we came in to go to bed, we woke Sam up. She’d go back to sleep, but every time we’d shift around in bed, Sam would hear us and think “HEY! People! It’s time to rock and roll!” and she’d be up. When neither rocking nor rolling ensued, she’d just get pissed and shout at us. So we learned to freeze in mid-motion like giant, shaved possums whenever we heard her move around. One morning I opened my sleepy eyes to see her sitting up in her pack-n-play, staring at me intensely as if to will my eyelids opened. It had apparently worked, and now I’m frightened of the baby with the psychic powers should she ever try to make my head explode.

And after all that, we drove back to Houston on Sunday. I think Sam was getting pretty annoyed with the whole “go to sleep, wake up in another state” thing, and it finally reached a boiling point with the plane trip back. She squirmed and shouted the whole way back, until 10 minutes before we landed in San Diego when she promptly went to sleep. Only to scream bloody blue murder when we woke her up to get off the damn plane. Now she’s all screwed up from the time zones and not napping at all today, so we just decided to put her to bed at 6:00 and live with the consequences. I’m typing this up now because I need to go to bed in preparation for getting woken up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. If I’m lucky.

I’ve got a ton of pictures, but here’s a few of the better ones featuring Samantha:

This week I finally managed to catch Sam in the act of standing up. She actually stood there for like 30 seconds, just kind of looking at me like “Hey, check me out, I’m a biped!” while I snapped pictures like a gibbering idiot. I shouted for Geralyn to come downstairs and she came on the run, thinking the Sam had fallen into the garbage disposal by the way I was screaming. Of course, Ger started clapping and whooping, which startled Sam so much she let go of her death grip on the chair, twisted around, and did a face plant into the carpet. Sorry, I didn’t take a picture of that part.

One thing you may notice from the that pic of Samantha in upright mode is that she’s getting bigger. She weighed 18 pounds around a week ago. This is, no doubt, due to the fact that she has decided that eating is the most important thing in the world, a recurring quest worthy of her gastrointestinal fanaticism. I mentioned this a while back, but she’s only been shoveling the food in faster and sometimes, I swear, with three hands. Yesterday, she ate three and a half pounds of mixed vegetables in 45 seconds and then shoved a whole avocado up her nose. Lately, a typical day for her involves eating rice cereal, banana, Cheerios, mixed vegetables, pureed fruit, pureed vegetables, cooked apple, avacado, cheddar cheese, and about six ounces of watered-down juice.

The funny thing is that she’s still not a chubby baby by any measure. I think she burns it all off, because unless she’s asleep or literally strapped down into a chair she’s on the move –crawling, shaking things, trying to pull up, cornering the cat, trying to break my DVD player, crawling some more. I’m never giving her coffee.

And now, pictures:

In all likelihood, Sam’s next update, including pictures, will be delayed as we take Sam’s Story on the road for a three-city World Tour. The three of us are flying to Houston, Texas to meet up with my sister. Then the four of us are driving up to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. This will be great, as we haven’t seen them in a while. So while Sam’s Story will probably be delayed, her most hardcore fans will get to see her live and on stage.

Not a particularly busy week this time. Sam’s only got one new trick for the week, but it’s a big one: she’s starting to pull up. For non-parents this may evoke images of Sam blasting her lats on the chinup bar while a drill sergeant yells at her, but everyone else will know what I’m talking about. We tried desperately to snap a picture of Sam while she was actually standing up on both feet, but she refused to cooperate, always falling back on her padded ass by the time our camera completed its ten-minute startup.

Since falling down on her rump doesn’t seem to hurt, we thought we had finished our baby proofing duties short of filling the whole house eight inches deep with styrofoam packing material. But, alas, we had our first “boo boo” last night. We had given Sam free reign of the dining room, watching her with one eye while she made her way over to the china cabinet (we just call it that; we don’t actually have any Chinese people in it). I hadn’t put locks on the lower drawers since they aren’t filled with poisoned thumbtacks like most other things in our house. As soon as Sam opened one of the drawers, I thought “Hrm, she could pinch her fingers if she clo–” WHAM! Drawer closed on fingers and oh the screaming. The screaming. Then Sam started to scream. I scooped her up, did the owie dance, and sang the alphabet song three times. It’s the only song I know other than AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” which I’ve been forbidden to perform. But don’t worry. Sam’s fine and will still be able to count to ten without taking off her shoes.

Here’s the pictures for the week:

You can see in some of those pictures that Sam still isn’t playing games with Dad like some kids, but I was glad to see her developing a healthy interest in geekery this week. She’s still new at video games, though, and whenever she tries to do Triangle, Circle, Down, she ends up doing Circle, Circle, Circle, Cram Controller In Mouth. But she’s learning.

Somewhere, right now, Sam is pointing at something. This is her new thing for the week, and she enjoys it immensely. When you bring her into a room she’ll start systematically pointing at everything, including the cat, the ceiling fan, the light, the floor, the sofa, the television, the magazine rack, the coffee table, the carpet, the lamp, the DVD player, her toys, my toys, books, the chair, the vent, the refridgerator, the window, the door, and the cat again. Then she’ll start over. She doesn’t say anything, even when we name everything she gestures towards. She just points. It’s cute, really, and if she learns to point at other people she may have quite a career ahead of her in politics.

But Sam is getting pretty good at using her fingers for things besides pointing, as well. She’s gotten adept at feeding herself bite-sized foods like cheese cubes, Cheerios, vegetables, and just about anything else we give her. Cottage cheese, however, is apparently gross. The rub is that Sam has gotten to where she can shovel the food in faster than her toothless head can chew it up and swallow it. So if I put a pile of Cheerios down in front of her, she’ll use both hands to cram them into her face by the fistful, fast as she can until she looks like the world’s most fiber-rich chipmunk. At which point she’ll open her oat-filled mouth and squawk for more.

Squawking aside, Saturday was fun. Geralyn went down to Tiajuana with her play group and spent most of the day there drinking margaritas and trying to explain to entreprenureal little Mexican kids that no, for the last time, they didn’t want to buy any Chicklets. I didn’t know exactly why one would go to Tiajuana other than being able to buy two and a half gallons of vanilla extract for $1.25, but I was glad to take care of Sam while Ger was out with her friends. We spent a good chunk of the day out as I mentioned yesterday, and the balance was spent with one of us cramming dry cereal into her maw.

When Geralyn returned she had a giant smile and a bag full of greasy churros. Churros, for those of you who don’t know, are these oily ropes of dough, deep fried and caked with sugar. I could tell right away that they would be awesome by the way they had made their brown paper bag almost transparent just by coming in contact with it. I was right and I quickly used them to demonstrate Sam’s recent eating habits.

Sorry, I’m supposed to be talking about Sam, aren’t I? Well, here’s some pictures:

This picture cracks me up. Sam is all decked out in her denim jacket with fuzzy pink collar, and the expression on her face looks like she’s just came back from Vegas where she went on a fabulous, five-day bender involving copious amouns of gin, tranquelizers, and churros. Give me a bottle of baby Tylenol and put me to bed, Dad, I’m all partied out! Note to my mother: Sam did not, of course, go on any such bender. She’s only allowed half a cup of gin per day until she’s a year old.

Also, this picture shows you pretty much exactly what I see whenever I’m home these days. Dang, she’s really looking up to me, isn’t she?