Sam’s Story: Week 26

Sam turned six months old this very day. I’m not sure why that seems like such a huge milestone, but it does. We have managed to keep another human being alive for six months –half a year– on little more than panic, hope, and stuff that came out of Geralyn. She had her six-month checkup and our pediatrician said that she was not only alive, but healthy, happy, and trucking along just fine in terms of development. I think we deserve a cookie for that. A cookie the size of Connecticut.

Sam’s adventures in semisolid foods continues, expanding this week to include peas and carrots and feet. Feeding her has become kind of fun, even if nobody thinks it’s funny when I tell Sam to eat her mashed peas because they’re “full of wholesome green peaness.” At least I find it funny.

The next major task creeping its way into minds is baby-proofing the house, which is a bit of a daunting project. I have a solution, though, that comes from an old joke I once heard about an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician who are all trying to fence in the largest possible area of land in the most efficient way. The engineer made a large circular fence, claiming the circle is the most efficient use of fencing material for the job. The physicist made a long, straight fence, and claimed he was assuming that the line was infinite and thus fenced in everything on the Earth south of that latitude. The mathematician beat them all by making a tiny fence around himself and saying “I declare myself to be on the outside.”

Nerdy joke, I know, but I think there’s wisdom in the mathematician’s approach. Instead of buying all those gates, latches, covers, and bumpers to babyproof the house, I think the much more rational approach is to take one small area –say the upstairs hall closet or the bathtub– and babyproof it, so that we can just relegate Sam to that area without having to worry about the rest of the house.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Until then, pictures:


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