Month: April 2006

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.