Sam’s Story: Week 128

This is kind of a special edition this week. I’ve been studying the traffic logs here at jmadigan.net, and I’m kind of alarmed at what I see. Traffic is actually up overall, but there has been a slight dip in the last few minutes. If growing up in the 80s and watching way too much TV has taught me anything, it’s that when things start to get stale you’ve got to make some changes to the lineup. Here’s just three examples I can think of off the top of my head:

Following this conventional wisdom, I thought I’d give you, dear denizens of the Internet, a sneak peek at a new character we’ve been working on for upcoming editions of Sam’s Story. Here’s the first publicity photo:

In other words, Ger is pregnant again.

Woo!

Now, to serve you better, I’ve taken the liberty of preemptively answering the 5 most common questions I think you all are likely to have. They are:

1. No, we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet.
2. Yes, we intend to find out as soon as we can. Surprises are great if it’s Christmas or if you’re Ed McMahon headed for my front door, but that’s about it.
3. Yes, we meant to do this. All is going according to plan.
4. I’m not sure yet. At the moment, I’m thinking that when the baby is born, I’ll discontinue the Sam’s Story weekly updates and just do a combined weekly update for the whole family. There’s no way I could find either the material or the time to do two weekly updates.
5. Walrus.

On a side note, I’ve yet to decide how to handle blogging about the pregnancy. I did a lot of that the first time around (click here and scroll to the very bottom of the page) but it was mainly about the learning experience of a couple of first-time parents who had never been through that particular act of gestation before. I don’t think I’ll have as much to say this time around, so when I discuss it it will probably be in the Sam’s Story updates or an occasional lone update as warranted. We’ll see.

What I do think I’ll do is do like I did before and take a weekly picture of Geralyn so we can track how that little baby making belly of hers progresses. Here’s this week’s picture (click for full size version):

With that announcement out of the way, let’s see some pictures of Sammy!

The majority of these pictures were taken out in the back yard with Sam’s swing set, or “playground” as she calls it. It’s got a few swings, some monkey bars, a covered picnic table, and a slide. Sam seemed dubious about the slide at first, but she got quite into it after a few experimental slithers down its bright yellow surface.

The only other thing I’ll say about Sam this week is that she has developed this odd little habit where if I ask her to do something she doesn’t want to do, she’ll look at me and say, for example, “No, Daddy wants to go get my shoes,” like the world’s most ineffective Jedi. Sometimes she even does the little hand gesture. It’s funny, though maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to call it ineffective. I usually do end up getting the shoes.