Sam’s Story: Week 51

As I mentioned in the pic of the day yesterday, Geralyn had two of her wisdom teeth taken out on Friday, leaving me to play the better parts of both parental roles while she recovered. Luckily, the most stressful thing I had to do was take Sam with me to the grocery store to buy Mac ‘n Cheese and the ingredients for a fruit smoothie. Sam had a blast at the store, but I very quickly learned to keep a good 12 to 14 inches between her and the goods lining the store shelves, lest there be cleanups on aisles 12, 10, 4, and 12 again (forgot the pickles).

The only other trial was, because of the lingering anesthesia in Ger’s system, trying to get Sam to drink last September’s breast milk after I resuscitated it from its deep freeze. Apparently, though, breast milk is all about the packaging and Sam would have none of this nonsense. She took one sip, scrunched up her face, and threw the bottle at me. She then demanded that I immediately uncork a nice apple juice, let it breathe for ten minutes, then bring it to her in the red sippy cup. The cup with the kitties, you oaf, not the tacky one one with the airplanes.

The other change we tried to pull on Sam was moving from simple rice cereal to the slightly more processed but probably more filling Cream of Wheat. Unfortunately this ended up being much more of an ordeal for us than her. Preparing rice cereal was easy: cereal and formula in equal proportions. Following the “For Toddlers” directions on the back of the Cream of Wheat box, however, left us completely flummoxed. To prepare the right amount of cereal, we had to solve the following equation:

Doing so involved plugging in the values for the desired amount of cereal, Sam’s birth date, the current barometric pressure, and for some reason the atomic weight of Beryllium (9.0122 in case you were wondering). Then we went through a four-stage cooking process that resulted in a cup of boiling Cream of Wheat that took half a day to cool down to anything close to an edible temperature. All this while a hungry Samantha screamed at us from her high chair. It was delicious –eventually– but at this point we’re considering just making it up a whole box at a time and freezing it into Wheat-Pops for later consumption.

Not many pictures this week, but here’s what we’ve got:

Sam still isn’t walking yet, but man she’s close. I think all she needs to do is get the idea that she can stand and move around without leaning against something and then WHAM! I’ll be sitting on the couch watching her, and then she’ll stand up and walk across the room, down the stairs, out the front door, and over the horizon before I can close my gaping mouth. And that will be bad, because Geralyn will think that I’d lost her and can’t find her, just like I lose my wallet every time we’re in a hurry to go somewhere. And I’ll look in my gym bag, because that’s where my wallet usually is, but Sam won’t be there. She’ll be halfway down the Baja Peninsula by then, never looking back. Go, Sam, go!

Next week will be the 52nd chapter in Sam’s Story, marking about one year of this epic, ongoing tale. I’m not sure what I want to do after that. On the one hand I could continue the weekly updates. I can usually find time to do work on them over the weekend, with the worst outcome being that I post half a day late on Monday morning. I like doing them, and I think there are going to be stories to tell for a long, long time. On the other hand, I could stop doing the regular updates and just post little stories about Sam as they happen, letting you get your pics fix through the Photo of the Day which features Sam more often than not. I’m not sure which way i want to go, though. Do any of you readers out there have an opinion on this? Would you miss the regularity of the weekly updates? Please, let me know one way or the other. Now’s your chance to de-lurk.