Sam’s Story: Week 136

Another busy week, with one bitter and one sweet thing to report.

The bitter comes in the form of a little pill with the word “No!” written on it. Honestly, I thought we had missed out on the terrible twos and that whole negativity thing, but Sam just appears to be late to the party. And it’s the kind of party where everybody wears black, listens to weird music, and drones on about the ultimate negation of the universe. Then they all get time outs because I’m totally not going to put up with that kind of thing.

Seriously, Sam will shout “No!” or “No it isn’t,” just to contradict us or deny us whatever favor we’ve asked for, like eating her banana or not jamming a nail in the electrical outlet when there’s a perfectly good one jammed in there already. This really kind of started out of the blue, though, so maybe it’ll go away just as quickly. Right?

The sweet thing to balance out the bitter, though, is that Sam has taken a shine to singing. This is profoundly odd, since neither Geralyn nor I sing. EVER. It’s not that we’re under any kind of court order, we just do it very, very poorly and don’t want to trouble the rest of the world with it. Sam, on the other hand, is pretty good. She’ll just sit there and make up songs, or she’ll sing tracks from Guitar Hero. The other night I listened through the baby monitor as she sang “Hey you, you’re nodding out / What’s this all about?” over and over for like 15 minutes.

The really funny thing, though, is when she sings in church. Like the rest of us she only knows some of the words, so she just chants along in these nonsense syllables with the occasional random word or snippet from another song thrown in. So we get something like this:

Oh ral ral ree, God
On Lord dah dah dah dur
Blood Elmo duh-duh
Tip me over and pour me out!

It’s cute, in a sacrilegious kind of way. And now, pictures.

I finally made it to the massive pool complex I mentioned the other weeK, and it was indeed pretty impressive. My favorite part was when I convinced Ger and Sam to yank on a particular rope that resulted in their own private deluge that I captured for posterity. Unfortunately it was like 73 degrees out and Sam didn’t really figure she should tell us she was cold until she was shivering and had goose bumps the size of actual geese. So we cut the visit a little short.

The next day, though, we went out to the fabled “Farm” with other members of Ger’s family for the Labor Day weekend. So instead of the pool, Sam got to squat in the lake. Many people hadn’t seen Sam in a while, and they were all suitably impressed with her charm and wit. And the fact that thanks to Dora and Diego, she can count in Spanish better than she can in English. Counting fingers comes out “uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco” just fine if she’s in a south of the border kind of mood, but otherwise it comes out to “one, two, three, eleven, nineteen!” almost every time.

We’re working on it. Plan B is for Ger and I to just learn more Spanish and pretty much just speak that.

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2 thoughts on “Sam’s Story: Week 136

  1. Jamie, here is a comment for you. 🙂 My daughter was born three months after Sammy, so I have always read your site in a kind of what-might-happen-next fashion. So far our 2-year-old hasn’t been terrible at all, either, but let’s see what happens in three months. She has just started whining and pleading recently, which is equal parts annoying and amusing thus far.
    Our daughter sings funny songs too, but what really cracks us up how she says the (Lutheran) Common Table Prayer, which starts out, “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest…” Our daughter’s version sounds more like, “Thomas Jesus, be a dress…”

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