Month: July 2006

One of the changes in Sam that I’ve noticed over the last week is that she’s become much more independent. Used to be that she would try to run this greedy little monopoly on our attention –if we were doing anything else besides playing with her, feeding her, or bringing her fruit snacks, we were in direct violation of some parent-child contract she had cooked up in her head. This kind of iron grip on our mind share could only broken by the Power of Dora, or possibly the denizens of Sesame Street, who we called upon for help whenever we absolutely had to. Recently, though, Sam will go off for longer and longer stretches of time –sometimes minutes— and do her own thing without demanding our involvement. She’ll color, play with her menagerie of stuffed animals, or whatever else happens to be in reach. Like the phone or the cat or the contents of the vegetable crisper.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the increased use of her imagination. Sam will now routinely pick up any object at all and announce that it is something it clearly is not. Which is awesome. So a pair of book ends become dogs, a strip of pink ribbon becomes a backpack, or a shallow plastic tray becomes a swimming pool for her Weebles. Apparently this kind of thing can make her little mind snap, though, as one excursion into make believe culminated in her asking, inexplicably, “ARE YOU A BOAT, DADDY? ARE YOU A BOAT?” as loud as she could for like fifteen minutes straight. I tried every answer I could think of –“Yes!” “No!” “Only on Tuesdays!”– but nothing would stop her. We just had to let the imagination fever run its course, at which point she just looked at me and said, “Daddy’s NOT a boat.” And that was that. I remain, to this day, not a boat.

Pictures!

You may also notice that we took Sam back to the pool this last weekend. This seemed like a sensible thing to do, given that the outside temperatures were pushing 5 hoojillion and 100% humidity. We quickly found out that Sam’s previous healthy respect for the water had at some point blossomed into a near psychotic disregard for all dangers of the type aquatic. She went totally bonkers for the pool, to the point of trying to leap in whether or not we were there to catch her and deciding that it was the greatest thing in the world to be thrown high over the waves and drop into a splash-inducing free fall. She was a total maniac for the water, and by the end of the afternoon she was practicing advanced techniques like shimmying around the pool edge and swallowing great gulps of chlorinated water. I’m quite proud and exhausted from all the fear.

Oh, and lest I forget, there is some significant news on the pregnancy front. We ended not having the amniocentesis done given the positive blood test and ultrasound results. The ultrasound technician, who was not as foul mouthed as the last one, did have a thing about hamburgers and hot dogs and revealed the sex of the baby.

In other words, Sammy is going to have a baby sister. Woo!

And actually, I still can’t make any sense at all out of those ultrasound pictures. I think that the baby is actually talking out of her femur in the picture above. Or maybe spine. I don’t know. All those grey smudges look the same to me. All I know is that everything looks healthy so far and I can’t wait to meet her in person.

This whole child thing is getting way complicated. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that Sam was a much simpler creature. You just had to make sure she was rested, fed, and clean and that was pretty much the extent of it. Now someone has exchanged that Parenting for Beginners accessory with an advanced model that is not only capable of telling you her most complex desires and emotional states, but in fact will not stop doing so. At all. Ever.

And many of these desires seem completely random and inexplicable. So instead of just crying because she’s hungry, Sam will insist that Daddy pick up the purple Weeble NO THE PURPLE ONE DADDY and put it on the couch AND NOW I WANT A STRAWBERRY no I don’t want it anymore Daddy put on a Dora DVD I want to watch a Dora DVD Sesame Street Daddy open the door I want to go to the playground NOW DADDY NOW now I want Daddy to chase me CHASE ME Daddy has a baby in his belly PICK UP THE PURPLE WEEBLE DADDY! Is there some kind of cheat sheet that I can use to keep up? Because this kid changes her mind faster than mine can keep up.

Still, frantic and bizarre as it’s all becoming, I think it’s all worth it at the end of the day. All Sam has to do is blurt out one hilarious non sequitur or demonstrate some bit of mundane conversational banter made precious simply by virtue of coming from a two year old. Last night we were sitting at the dinner table when she looked up at me and said “So how was your day, Daddy?” in a perfectly casual tone that suggested she really was interested. I’m sure she just picked it up from Geralyn, but the fact that she’s now getting old enough to ask such a question and expect an answer is completely awesome. Nevermind that as soon as I started to answer her she started shouting/singing “Happy Birthday” to the cat.

Pictures!

On the pregnancy front, things are going pretty smoothly. Geralyn is having another blessedly uneventful time of it so far, with no morning sickness or any of that other nasty stuff. Just like with Sam, in fact. The only stressful thing on the horizon is a possible amniocentesis later this week. Apparently when expecting mothers are of a certain age the genetic councilors come out and tell them frightening stories like how there’s an increased chance that their kid may turn out to be the next Attila the Hun, but that they can totally test for that kind of thing. Unfortunately the most foolproof of these tests involves stabbing you in the belly with a huge needle to suck out some baby juice. Of course, they don’t say things like that, they say something like “insert a long syringe into the abdomen to extract a sample of amniotic fluid.” But your imagination kind of takes the latter and rewrites it to the former. I mean thinking about it makes me squirm and I don’t even have a uterus.

Still, we want to do what’s best for Baby and for Mom, so we’re going to consider all the options. At any rate, we have an ultrasound appointment coming up which should hopefully leave us with precious knowledge of the baby’s sex. So place your bets now and tune in next week.

Prior to the last few weeks I was always skeptical when parents of older children would tell me that kids would “test the boundaries” as a part of natural social and mental development. “Oh, my little Billy,” they’d say. “He’s a handful, but he’s just testing the boundaries. It’s how he learns.” I usually just nodded, but I always privately thought it much more likely that Billy was just a little bastard at heart and that the only boundaries he’d be testing later in life would be prison bars. If we’re lucky.

Alas, the last few weeks have disabused me of those quaint notions. Samantha, previously the most milquetoast of creatures, has begun poking, jabbing, and kicking at every boundry she can find. Take the following exchange, which happened over the weekend when Sam grabbed my power drill and pointed it at her left eyeball.

“Samantha,” I barked, “put that down! It’s not a toy.”

“It’s not a toy,” she repeated, putting it back on the floor where I had carefully left it and then stepping back. She then gave me a sly look and added, “I can just look at it.”

“That’s right. Just look. Knock yourself out with all the looking.”

Keeping an eye on me, she edged closer to the drill again. “I can just touch it,” she said, kneeling down and laying a single finger on it.

“No, Samantha. Don’t touch even it.”

This got her to stand up and remove the offending finger. Again she gave me a coy look and gently nudged it with her toes. “I can just kick it.”

I’m pretty sure that if I had left her to it she would have moved on to poking it with a stick or activating it with telekenesis, but I figured the easiest thing to do was to just put the thing away. Dangerous power tools aside, I can see I’m in for a balancing act. I don’t want to stifle her natural curiosity and attempts at exploring the world. I want her to experience and learn as much as she wants to. But obviously there are limits as to what’s healthy and what’s socially acceptable. I guess we’ll just have to do our best and hope she doesn’t end up sharing a cell block with little Billy.

And now, pictures.

The last thing I wanted to address this week is the mystery that has recently developed around Samantha’s coloring books. Like many kids her age, she delights in grabbing fist fulls of crayons and scribbling madly over some cheery outline. Or she’ll ask us to draw something like a heart or a flower of Thomas the Tank Engine so that she can color it in. I don’t have any frame of reference for the artistic merits of her work, but most of her coloring seems to me to be within the normal parameters of a two year old. Here’s a typical portrait:

Now this picture makes my inner child chuckle for reasons that are both too obvious and too uncouth for mixed company, but it’s a good example of what you’d expect from someone who can’t hold a crayon in anything but a tight fist.

However, when flipping through the coloring books I find that up to ten percent of the pictures resemble something more like this:

Note the slight increase in penmanship. Crayonmanship. Whatever. Now, either Sam is entering into and out of a temporary state of artistic savantedness or we have a phantom artist hitting the books when I’m not looking. I don’t want to cast any aspersions, but I do sometimes see Geralyn sitting at Sam’s little table, hunched over something. So it’s either her or, if Saturday morning cartoons have taught me anything, Old Man Jones wearing a rubber mask and using a fog machine.

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.

The big event recently, as I mentioned last week, is that we finally moved into our new house. Now it’s not a mansion by any standards, but coming from the postage-stamp sized houses of Southern California it sure feels like one to us. I keep thinking of those diagrams that show the size of Earth relative to Jupiter or the Sun whenever I can’t remember where I left my wallet. Which is often.

This also means that Ger and I have had to develop some new attitudes about letting Sam roam the place unattended. In California we usually wouldn’t let her stay on another floor unattended, and the place was set up so that we could pretty much keep an eye (or at least an ear) on her this way. Now she can be totally out of the picture at any time and the image of her in my mind changes from her doing safe things like reading to her stuffed animals is replaced by images of her taking an electric drill to the basement drywall or doing backflips off the stairs. But we’re getting used to it.

Sam, too, has had to adjust to the size of the new place. Our second night there we were playing in the basement when I told her it was time for her bath. Sam acquiesced and climbed the stairs to the living room on the main floor where she paused to look around with a confused and slightly worried look on her face. She then turned to me and asked “Where did the bathtub go?” I mean, I climbed stairs, Daddy, and I distinctly remember the bathtub being upstairs, so WHAT’S GOING ON, MAN?

She’s got things figured out now, though. Last night we were playing on the swing set in the back yard when I decided to engage her in conversation about the new place. “Sammy,” I said, “do you like the new house?”

“Yeah, I do like it.”

“Why? What do you like about it?”

At this Sam paused to purse her lips and gather her thoughts. “I like the oveeeen, and I like the microwaaaave, and I like the dishwasherrr, and I like the teveeee, and I like the siiink…” This went on for like five minutes, with her just sitting there on the tire swing and naming off all the appliances and fixtures she could think of, stretching out the enunceation of each one as if to say “Ohmygosh, there’s just so much cool stuff here!” And funny as it was, I had to agree with her –I like the TV, too.

Sam also had absolutely no problems transitioning to a full twin bed, either. The first night we put her in it she gave it an initially dubious look, then seemed to decide that it was okay before demanding that one of us get in there with her and read “Go, Train, Go!” seven hundred times in a row. She slept through the night without getting up once that we know of until about 7 a.m. the next morning when Ger found her halfway down the stairs in search of breakfast. I swear, this kid is so easy going it’s eerie sometimes.

Pictures!

Most of the pictures, you may note, are from a trip to “The Farm,” which is a place out in the country that Ger’s parents, aunts, and uncles own. Sam has been there before. There’s a rickety old barn with a swing, there’s a beach, and there’s a small lake. Sam thought all of the above were increasingly awesome as the day went by and she learned valuable new skills like throwing rocks or slinging wet sand at everyone in sight.