Sam’s Story: Week 20

Where to start? With the screaming, I suppose. Specifically, THE SCREAMING. When we got back from vacation earlier this week, Ger and I decided that it was past time for Sam to learn to nap in her crib during the day. She’s stupendously talented at sleeping through the night, but napping has yet to come easily to her, and the result is often a cranky baby by early evening and total meltdown by 7:00 or so. So naps are in order.

After some research and opinion hunting, Geralyn decided on a mish-mash approach that combines elements of the Ferber method (a.k.a., “Letting them Cry Until Their Lungs Deflate Method”) and some stuff from a book called “The Baby Whisperer”. It’s quite complex and nuanced. We start off letting Sam scream her head off for 4 minutes –as she always done because we are messing with her world through the unthinkable act of trying to get her to sleep in her bed. After 4 minutes Ger goes in and comforts her, then leaves. Screaming resumes for 8 minutes, 12 minutes, 15 minutes, and 15 minutes. Eventually Sam goes to sleep. Or as others might say, “tumbles into an exhausted slumber from all the screaming”.

Now this is hard. Really f’ing hard. Ger has called me at work completely distraught, convinced that the Child Screaming Warden (I imagine his badge would look like a little silver pacifier) is going to show up and tell her that her baby has used up all the screams there are in the entire world, and that now she must PAY for all that screaming. Yesterday and today I took Ger’s place in this whole ugly drama and I completely agree. It’s heart breaking, no matter how much we know it’s going to be worth it in the end.

On a happier front of the baby battleground, Sam has discovered her newest Favorite Thing: this keyboard I’m using to type these words. Ger handed her off to me while I was doing some surfing, and the next thing I knew she reached out and started pounding on the keyboard. I think she almost reformatted my hard drive. I know she bookmarked the Wonderbra page of the Victoria’s Secrets online catalog, except that she named it “Favorite Recipes.” Delighted to channel this interest, though, I opened up a word processor and let her go to town crafting Baby’s First Manifesto:

,kukjkkkkkxx–.lk;-;.0oooppppp../;[o9pb
-pkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk viiiiiiiiiiii
[dddddddddddddddddddiolk,immmg

I think you’ll agree that the use of allegory is both subtle and brilliant. She’s a friggin’ genius. I believe Sam’s other talents include gardening, as her other Favorite Thing at the moments is to rip out my chest and arm hairs like they’re weeds. I also think she has enough drool to water the whole lawn if I were to sit her down out there for a few minutes.

And now, more cuteness in pictographocal form:

Few fun things to note about these pics. First, Sam got $20 from her Great Aunt Cleo at her christening party, and we decided to spend it on another Baby Einstein DVD. We did this without consulting Sam, as we were pretty sick of the Baby Bach one. We got the Baby Mozart one, and as you can see, she’s completely entranced whenever we put it on.

We’ve found that it’s terribly easy to spend the whole weekend inside the house if you’re not careful, so we decided to go to the beach. Sam just slept through most of it while Ger had a delicious fish taco and I tried to rationalize away irrational fears that our baby was going to somehow get sucked out to deep sea by a riptide, even though we were two hundred yards away from the water.