Sam’s Story: Week 102

Christmas has come and gone, but I’m still playing with my new toy –a new camera. One of the things I love is the “burst mode,”, which lets you take like 4 pictures a second. We were at the park and Ger put Sam on this thing that spins around in a tight circle when you turn a wheel. Sam totally loved it and it gave me a chance to test out the burst mode paired with a quick shutter speed to capture the action. This is the result (click for a larger version):

As you can see in the last 2 frames, Sam eventually but suddenly decided to get off this crazy thing and went flying to the sand beneath her. She was unhurt, but thoroughly dizzy and had to just sit still for a few minutes while the world stopped spinning.

Sam’s other adventures this week included a trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I have a ton of pictures from that, but I’ll post them later. Now that she’s a bit older, watching her reactions to the various park exhibits was pretty entertaining. She’d do her best to make all the animal sounds she knew, though according to her every bird on God’s green earth goes “Quack! Quack!”

And she was only freaked out once. In an aviary exhibit where these little parakeet-like birds would flutter down and try to land on your arms or shoulders in search of a tasty treat sold for an outrageous $2 an ounce to gullible and dim-witted tourists (i.e., me and Ger). When the flurry of colorful wings descended on us, Sam put on a look of quiet terror and ran into my arms. Well, knees. It was kind of nice feeling –not that she was frightened, but that she immediately went to me for comfort.

Here’s some more pictures:

I kind of like this one because it seems like she’s sitting on the “big kid swing” while looking at the “baby swing” a little wistfully. Like she’s just now realizing that she’s growing up and leaving some things behind forever. Or maybe she was just looking at the doggie over there on the left or something. Whatever, I like my interpretation better.

Finally, here’s a tip that I learned from Parenthacks.com and which every parent should know about. Flickr is a website where people can upload photographs for viewing by the rest of the world and associate them with keywords. You can search on certain keywords and display the resulting pile of pixilated pictures as a slide show. I found that doing this on a search for keywords like “Teddy Bear” will entrance Sam for large stretches of time. She sat in my lap for 18 minutes watching slide show and shouting out “Doo doo!” (which is, inexplicably, her word for “bear”) at every single picture. Meanwhile, I had another browser window open and was merrily surfing away.

God bless the Internet, warts and all.