news of the snudge...

new blog

2009-09-20T21:27:00.001-04:00

Hi everyone--
Updating on both kids from now on here.

boycott

2009-09-02T15:06:00.002-04:00

I just emailed customer service at Totes/Isotoner to tell them I'm boycotting them and asking my family/friends to do so, due to their recent firing of a temporary worker at their West Chester, Ohio plant-- she took "unscheduled" breaks to pump breastmilk for her 5-month-old.

http://www.examiner.com/x-19956-Long-Island-New-Moms-Examiner~y2009m9d2-Court-Upholds-Firing-of-Breastfeeding-Mom

The email address I found is this one, if you'd like to do the same: customerservice@totes.com

think they're related?

2009-08-20T21:43:00.004-04:00

top: Frida at 3 days
bottom: Sam at 6 days

(Upon being shown this pairing, Sam says, totally blasé, "All babies look the same, y'know.")

she's finally here

2009-08-18T23:42:00.004-04:00

Name story (and eventually more pics) here.

important jobs

2009-08-18T23:21:00.001-04:00

A couple of days ago, in the morning:

Sam: Mommy, I’m going poo. It’s your turn to wipe.
(I’m in (early? pre? who knows) labor, and so delegate this to J, who’s having breakfast… Sam can wipe himself but does better with supervision.)
Sam: OK, Daddy, it’s your turn to wipe.
(He whispers urgently to me, before heading to the bathroom) Mommy, you need to make sure Daddy’s food doesn’t get moldy.
me: OK, I’ll watch his food and make sure to chase the mold away while he’s wiping you.
Sam: OK, you both have important jobs.

pics from Martha's Vineyard

2009-08-07T21:33:00.005-04:00

Sam does a classic 4-year-old fake smile when posing:

so it takes a little art to get him to look genuine:

This is not the house we rent. This is about 4x the size.

still pregnant

2009-08-07T10:10:00.003-04:00

I promised a friend I'd post a picture of my 9-month-pregnant belly, but haven't taken it yet. And I apologize for writing about not-Sam on Sam's blog (stay tuned for info about a new, Sam+baby blog). But I kind of liked the two metaphors I came up with this past week, one to describe how it feels to be walking around 9 months pregnant with a baby who "dropped" a couple of weeks ago (to a grad student in the lab who's male and hasn't had much of anything to do with pregnancy), and the second to describe how it feels to know that labor could happen Any Minute Now (but maybe not for another couple of weeks).

The first: Imagine you have intestinal cramps, and also a coconut shoved up your butt, and also 30 extra pounds strapped to your front. Now walk around and try to be cheerful!

The second: Imagine you have to run a marathon (or something similarly both physically and mentally grueling). You are as ready as you can be, that's not the problem. The thing is that you could be stopped at any time, day or night, and told to START RIGHT NOW. And in the meantime, you're supposed to go about normal life.
lalala sleeping: START RUNNING NOW
lalala working: START RUNNING NOW
lalala eating dinner: START RUNNING NOW

(Yes, I realize that labor starts a bit slower than this most of the time. But when you've been walking around with off-and-on crampiness for two weeks, it really is Any Minute Now, but also Maybe Not For A While. So yeah, it makes me a little pissy.)

In Sam news: two weeks of preschool left, then two weeks off, then kindergarten starting right after Labor Day! We had a lovely playdate/meetup organized by his new school, for incoming kindergartners/junior-kindergartners (the classes are all mixed, as is the whole school-- JK/K, 1/2, 3/4, etc). So we met some of his future classmates, but since they haven't yet determined who's going to be in which classroom we don't know which of the kids we met will be in Sam's class vs. in neighboring classes (there are 5 JK/K classrooms). Hopefully we'll hear next week; there's another playdate/meetup scheduled for next week as well.

Yesterday after we got home J. was heading out to buy some bread and cheese and lettuce (from the nearby Fancy Gourmet Food Store) to supplement the zucchini frittata planned for dinner. He asked if Sam wanted to join him-- Sam usually loves visiting this store, because he gets to sample all the cheeses. Sam said, though, that he wanted to go for a *plain* walk (i.e. one where "you don't go anywhere"), so we promised we'd go after dinner, especially because it was a nice not-too-hot evening. And we did-- a long walk, me waddling determinedly and Sam alternating between running ahead (he's finally gotten reliable about checking driveways as he passes them, turning his head and calling out "No cars!") and holding hands so he can jump over cracks or swing on J's arm. We're definitely enjoying our last bit of time as a family-of-three, even while anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next member of our family...

someone else's description of 4

2009-07-23T23:01:00.000-04:00

from dooce: http://dooce.com/2009/06/25/44-time

Hooo boy.

projection? or manipulation?

2009-07-15T22:51:00.002-04:00

Sam, this morning, having just heard that he was going to have dinner with his (beloved) Aunt S. and Uncle D., while mommy and daddy went to a 'grown-up restaurant':
"Won't you be lonely having dinner with just Daddy?"

(Dinner, btw, was fabulous-- S and D urged us to cash in a gift certificate they'd given us months ago, while they took Sam out for pizza, because if we don't do it soon who knows when we will be able to again.)

T-26 days (or thereabouts). Not that anybody is counting.

girl

2009-03-24T14:30:00.002-04:00

Sam came with us to the 18-week (structural) ultrasound a couple of weeks ago. Though he was convinced that it was a boy (at the time-- he'd been referring equally to "brother" and "sister" in the weeks leading up to it), we saw three clear parallel lines-- it's a girl! Or at least they're 90% certain that it is. Yay! We honestly would have been thrilled with either, but yes, I am already figuring out how to indulge my fetish for little girl shoes. And Sam quickly adjusted to planning his explorations of the "spiky mountains in California" (which we've told him he can start exploring on his own, a recent obsession, once he turns 18) together with his sister "when she gets bigger".

We're in FL enjoying being warm. Pics when we're back.

Birthday party!

2009-03-15T17:12:00.006-04:00

We had Sam's bday party yesterday. It wasn't as bad as anticipated, for a couple of reasons: we instituted a "no siblings, please" policy, and then 5 of the 13 invitees couldn't attend in the end, so it was a very civilized 8 guests. Much of the time they just played with Sam's toys, but there was also a game of Twister:

Then sat on balloons to pop them (and get the stickers inside:

In addition to some snacks, we had RR crossing cupcakes (a train cake proving beyond my decorating skills):

And then some not-too-nutty gift opening (Sam is definitely in the age of the Fake Camera Smile! also that's frosting on his nose, not a humongous booger):

[We'd gone back and forth on the "opening gifts while kids are still there" question, but so many kids clearly wanted to see Sam open the gifts they had brought that we did it, but not in the organized-activity kind of way; it worked out pretty well in the end.]

So, all in all, it was a good time, nobody got hurt, the noise level stayed within acceptable levels, and Sam was very pleased. And he got some great gifts.

He'll shortly start posting his own pics to this blog, as well: Omi and Opa gave him a kiddie digital camera. So far his efforts have mostly been partial head shots (ears etc) with plenty of light fixtures etc, but I'm sure he'll get better with practice (and with outdoor photo-taking, where there's not as much of a delay for the flash).

Feb & March pics

2009-03-15T16:47:00.004-04:00

In February, working with a magnifying glass and a flashlight to find bugs in Daddy's hair. (Just for the record, there weren't any, though Sam claims to have found some on previous occasions. There was a lice outbreak in his school a few weeks ago, so that might have contributed to his interest.)

And then earlier this month, posing with a particularly complex locomotive that he had just made:

concept

2009-03-06T23:56:00.002-05:00

Sam coloring furiously on his Doodle Pad: "I'm making a concept."
I look over his shoulder, note only that he's colored in just about the whole surface. "What's a concept, Sam?"
"It's when you color the whole thing black."
"Where did you learn that?"
"On television."

Hm. This is what happens when I sleep in past the end of kids' programming on PBS on a Saturday morning, apparently.

In other news, we're picking up Sam's new bike from the bike shop tomorrow. Even though there's still a fair bit of snow on the ground, he and I are both excited. Hopefully the snow will clear enough for him to ride it soon-- maybe even on his birthday weekend (in two weeks). It has removable pedals, so it functions first as a balance bike and then as a real bike w/pedals, hopefully skipping right over the training wheel phase.

And next weekend we'll have 14(ish) 3-5-year-olds in our home (yes, our 1100 square foot home), not to mention their parents, for Sam's birthday party. That should be interesting. Sam's Omi is coming for a few days to help out and celebrate with him. At the end of the following weekend we'll head down to FL for some warmth and another celebration w/Grandma and Grandpa. Pics coming soon!

growing up

2009-02-21T22:04:00.004-05:00

A list of the things Sam has said he wants to be when he grows up (over the past two weeks):

- a space shuttle driver
- a garbage truck driver
- a woman (not exactly that he wants to be one, but I think he said "when I grow up and my hair gets really long I will be a woman")
- a fireman
- a scientist who studies planets

In more immediate-term growing-up news, Sam's desperate to hang out with the slightly older boys in his class, a clique of 3, one of whom seems especially bent on excluding him. It's heartbreaking to watch; Sam's not quite at the age where he 'gets' intentional meanness and exclusion, so he just gets hurt by it. Obviously this kind of thing isn't going to go away for years (well, ever, really) but watching it as a parent hurts. (It's also a strange side effect of Sam's preschool/daycare being a co-op that I get to watch these interactions first-hand, and have to stop myself from throttling the kids doing the excluding.) While I don't feel like I want to micromanage his social life, we're also making efforts to schedule play dates and other out-of-school interactions with other classmates with whom he plays more compatibly.

analogies

2009-02-04T13:10:00.002-05:00

This one made J. happy:

Driving along Memorial Drive on the way home from Trader Joe's the other night, Sam was asking us to name all the bridges we passed. One of them was the Weeks Footbridge, and J. asked Sam if he knew why it was called a footbridge. Sam thought for a minute then figured out, because it's for people to walk on, not for cars. Then he thought for another minute and noted that the other bridges should be called wheel bridges. He has a point, there.

heartbeat

2009-01-27T00:59:00.005-05:00

OK, it's official: Sam's brother or sister is due August 10th. Or thereabouts. We saw the heartbeat today.

Of course, after this past summer, we are still cautious at this stage: we saw a heartbeat then too, and then two weeks later heartbreak. But we're optimistic.

But in the meantime, the very nice ultrasound tech printed a separate blurry picture just for Sam, which he examined very closely this evening with his magnifying glass (he is convinced of the magical power of magnifying glasses and microscopes after weeks of nightly readings of Flotsam). Sam is having mixed feelings (we don't bring it up that often, but he's known for a while); he sometimes talks about things he will show or teach the baby, but the other night as I was leaving his room after snuggling in his bed for a while, he asked why I keep having babies. Just one more, Sam, I told him, our family will have you and your brother or sister. But why? he said, I don't want to have another baby, I want to be the only baby. I gave him lots of kisses and reassurance... mindful of Penelope Leach's analogies between things commonly said to first children when discussing siblings, and how such things would sound when spoken by one spouse to another ("I like having you as a wife so much that I thought I'd get another one! You can help me take care of her!") and glad we have lots of time for him to begin to work out his feelings.

more potty humor

2009-01-23T21:05:00.006-05:00

J. got back last night after 10 days away, and Sam has been beside himself with excitement. This evening they've been playing while I attempt to finish drafting a fellowship application that's due frighteningly soon. Yes, I have been procrastinating, but I've also been solo-parenting and grading last semester's final papers while existing on 3-ish hours of sleep a night, due to some miserable insomniac effect of hormonal wackiness. (Which seems to have abated just the past two nights-- the insomnia, that is, not the hormonal wackiness.) Anyway-- tonight after reconfiguring the tracks on the train table

and building walls out of big cardboard blocks, they went fishing over the side of the bedrail.

Sam's in his pajamas because it was Pajama Day at preschool, and had donned a fishing hat of J's (bit mysterious because I'm not sure J.'s ever been fishing, or at least not since childhood).

Anyway, Sam had been jumping around clearly needing to pee but denying it, and then finally realized what was going on with his bladder and ran to the bathroom, asking J. to pull down his pants because the urge was so desperate. And... Sam didn't quite make it, as evidenced by the brief yelp from J. coming from the bathroom, then Sam observing, "You got pee on your pants too."

gayline

2009-01-22T19:55:00.002-05:00

So the other night we were eating twice-baked potatoes and Sam had broccoli on the side ("can I have some meat or something please?" he asked politely upon seeing his plate) and I had a raw carrot because broccoli seemed distinctly unappealing at the time; J. has been out of town writing. Sam finished his broccoli with gusto, as usual, then watching me crunch my carrot asked for a "whole big carrot" (as opposed to the usual carrot sticks), so I gave him one. And watched carefully to make sure he was chewing, and asked him to please chew carefully. He remarked on how hard it was to bite through, and said he would have to use his sharpest teeth to do so: "my gay-line teeth" he said. I didn't catch it and had to ask, "which ones?", upon which he clarified "these pointy ones!" Oh right! The gayline teeth.

Also: the kids illustrated and narrated books at preschool during a theme on stories and story-telling. Sam's was entitled "Poopy Everywhere" and though one might at first charitably imagine that he was following up on "Everyone Poops", an occasional favorite read of ours, closer inspection reveals that the style is somewhat-- ok completely-- different. For example, the last page reads: "And then he pooped all over the house, even on the walls and even all over the ceiling!" with an illustration that heavily features brown marker. His teachers told him he had to take it home, because they don't use bathroom language in the classroom (outside of the restroom area)-- but they stressed to me that they told him he did a good job and there was nothing wrong with the book, he just couldn't keep it at school (where all the other kids' books are displayed on a wall). He still seemed proud of it when we first looked at it, with lots of guffawing as we read it together, but after he overheard me telling someone about it, he got embarrassed, and now says he made a "book about a bad thing". Which is a tough one, because while the potty talk can get waaaay too exuberant (and there are seriously turds depicted on every page of the book-- all four of them, if you include the cover), I don't want him to feel bad about what he makes, either.

latest snudge

2009-01-12T21:18:00.002-05:00

Two from tonight:
"I think skyscraper is another word for babysitter."
Really? why is that?
"Because skyscrapers babysit the sky."

"Daddy, would you prefer to have your ice cream another time?"

And from the past couple months...
(Having been told he couldn't go to the airport to pick up Aunt L., who was arriving late in the evening for Thanksgiving):
"When I am a grownup, I will do the things that grownups do."
Do you think that will be fun?
"Yes. I will go to meet people when they come to visit, and you... will stay HOME! and go to BED!"

(During a week-long focus on "friends and families" at preschool):
"What are grownups who live by themselves called?"
Hm, what do you mean?
"What are grownups who live by themselves called?"
(I think for a bit.) What are grownups who don't live by themselves called?
"Families. So what are grownups who live by themselves called?"

check us out

2008-12-19T21:09:00.001-05:00

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

holiday gifts

2008-12-17T20:24:00.004-05:00

We don't do Santa in our house. Christmas and Hanukkah, for us, are about giving and lights and the joy of thinking about other people in the cold of midwinter. Sam gets gifts from us and from lots of other people, and we figured Sam would give gifts to everyone as soon as he was old enough for that to make sense. So this year (starting, actually, with birthdays a few months ago) I started asking him seriously what he thought various people would like. Every kid we ask about, he's convinced would like a train. Or, if questioned again, ("Do you really think Zoe likes trains as much as you do?") he might switch to a truck, or a racecar. Adults, in contrast, he's sure all want glass trains. I don't think Sam has ever seen a glass train, or had such a thing suggested to him; my guess is that he can't imagine anyone not liking a train because, well, duh. But adults like finicky fragile things that you can't play with but instead just have to look at-- so, glass trains it is.

(We ended up going to the candy store instead of looking for glass trains for everyone. He can imagine people liking chocolate too, and I don't think anyone will be sorry to get it!)

halloween and spelling

2008-11-03T22:56:00.003-05:00

Here's Sam Friday evening in his lion costume, in his preschool room at the end of the day. A bunch of the kids went out trick-or-treating together in a neighborhood close by the school that goes all-out (closing streets off, major decorating efforts, etc). So they had a quick dinner at school then got dressed. J. took him; I went home to hand out candy (and escape the mayhem).

On Saturday we had friends (J's postdoc and his wife) over for dinner. While we were talking after dinner, Sam was laboriously sounding out the spelling of a long and complicated word on his (3-letter-space) "word whammer" toy (a gift that's been unfortunately compelling him to make all words 3 letters long). He ran into the dining room excitedly to show it to us: ZLF. "I spelled xylophone!" he exclaimed with such pride that, really, how could we tell him he was wrong? Also, if he were writing in Hebrew, he'd be pretty close to correct (what with the optional vowels).

pics

2008-06-10T22:05:00.004-04:00

Wow. So much for my attempt to post once a month... It's been a rough few months, but things are looking better on many fronts these days.

Here are some pics of Sam hiking in the woods and running on the beach on a recent weekend in Maine (our break between the end of classes/grading and the beginning of summer work). We stayed in Freeport, and went hiking at Bradbury Mountain State Park one morning, followed by a bit of shopping in Freeport (while Sam and Josh napped in the car); the next day we went to Popham Beach and walked around, then drove to Portland and went on the Narrow Gauge Railroad (a real steam train). Sam was actually more interested in the train tables we encountered along the way (three separate train tables) than in the steam train itself, but all in all it was a very nice weekend.

More hopefully soon...

Three years minus 2 months

2008-01-20T23:22:00.001-05:00

I think I'm going to start posting every month on or near the 20th, just so I get a bit more regular with the posting again. Whew. Sam's nearly 3, and seems suddenly older (than 2, that is) these days. Not only has his language evidenced a notable spurt in sophistication recently-- examples soon, I promise-- but he's also shot up in the last month: pants that used to fit are all too short, and pants that we had to roll up no longer require rolling. He's still showing some charming 2-year-old defiance (when it's time to wash hands, he will wail dramatically, "nono I don't *want* to"), but one can explain many other things to him quite reasonably. It's fun. He's funny, too. His and J's silly-word games have progressed, and a current favorite is the "sometimes I wear a ____ for a hat" game (most memorable fill-in? "Sometimes I wear a grocery store for a hat.")

Here are a few things that have happened since the end of October:

- Sam has become fully day-time potty trained. No efforts towards night-time potty training, though. What's the point, really?

- Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. came to stay with us for Thanksgiving (which Uncle D and Aunt S hosted most fabulously). Sam had a great time with them, and they were a major help, especially since I'd gotten a call scheduling a job interview for the following week just the day before they came (so was frantically prepping a job talk and teaching demo, and prepping for my interviews w/the members of the department).

- I interviewed for a job. Fingers crossed.

- We celebrated Hanukkah. We didn't light the menorah every night, but we did it a few times, and the other nights we at least lit the big candle that we keep on the dining table, and which Sam loves to have lit for dinner. We also went to a lovely Hanukkah party one night at our upstairs neighbors' home. Sam has been enjoying his "doctor tools" and puzzles from Aunt S and Uncle D, and his car tracks and Colorforms (do you remember colorforms? I totally did) from us.

- We had Sam's daycare classroom's potluck. Note to self: don't try to make a last-minute hors d'oeuvres for an event to which you'll be coming straight from work, which you're also organizing, and to which you'll be late because you have to stop and pick up cards for the teachers along the way. The potluck was fun, though. We stayed late with a couple of other families, put on music, and the kids danced and danced (while we sat around drinking wine and chatting). How cool is Sam's daycare?

- We took Sam ice skating for the first time, outside of the Charles Hotel. He wasn't as into it as I thought he would be, given how much he likes to slide around on the ice in his shoes (and on the floors pretending to skate). But it was fun for a few minutes at least:

Then we flew to MN to spend Christmas with Omi and Opa. We had dinner with my HS friend D. and her family. Brownie sundaes for dessert keeps four (one off-camera) kids very quiet.

We did some fun winter-snowy things with Sam: a couple of small snowmen (the snow was too dry and powdery to attempt anything bigger, sadly), and some good sledding. Sam wasn't as enthused abotu the sledding as we'd imagined, either, though he liked it. He did say many times on both sledding occasions, though, "I don't like the dust part" (the snow blowing up into his face when we'd hit some powder).

Doesn't he look spiffy in his coordinated winter things? G'ma and G'pa bought him the jacket, hat, and boots for Hanukkah. Sam had been asking for orange winter boots; they arrived just before the first of several snowstorms we got in Boston.

On the way back from sledding with Sam and Sam's Opa, J. slipped on the icy street and broke his wrist. Fortunately it's his left, so he's only been slightly disabled-- with the most recent version of the cast he can even type. But our car is a manual transmission, so he hasn't been able to drive since we got back. The cast should finally be off this Friday, and I'm not sure which of us will be more relieved.

Sam and I baked and decorated some cookies:

On Christmas Eve we lit the candles on the "crimmus tree" (J. can't stop picturing the whole thing going up in flames, but while I share his anxiety-- we do keep a bucket of water nearby-- it's overcome for me by a combo of fond tradition and just loving how beautiful it looks). We sang carols and opened presents. The bullet train from Uncle M. and Aunt R. was the runaway (no pun intended) hit of the evening, and of the days to follow.

It was competing with the Spiderman scooter Omi bought when he couldn't stop riding it around the consignment store, and of course the tricycle he got last year which was rediscovered with joy when we arrived, and which he rode at alarming speed through the house. Next year I'm sure it'll be an "outside toy."

We got home a couple days later and geared up to host a "New Year's Eve in Spain" party-- continuing the tradition started by friends who began hosting New Year's Eve parties set in locations 6 hours to the east, in order to be able to toast the New Year at 6PM (midnight Paris/Tunis/Barcelona time) and get kids in bed at something resembling reasonable. (I note with a bit of embarrassment that for our Snudge lately, bedtime has been something like 10PM... but embarrassment only because there seems to be this ethic that children should be in bed by 8. Sam sleeps til 8:30 (sometimes later). It's all very civilized.) Anyway... the party was a blast. Some of our favorite parent-friends joined us with babies and toddlers, and some of our favorite nonparent-friends joined us too and marveled at the chaos.

Here's Sam (and J's cast) in exhausted post-party-ness, Dalí-esque mustache still faintly evident:

new hampshire

2007-10-25T22:24:00.000-04:00

Whew-- well it's been a crazy three months, and I'm not even going to try to fill in everything that happened during that time. In short: enjoyed our farm share from Stillman's Farm; had parts of the house painted; tried to keep up with the garden but didn't really succeed; the usual jamboree of grant- and paper-writing and data collection; went to the park a lot; got a new bikeseat for Sam for J's bike that fits in the front so he can see-- whee!-- and then the two of them went on lots of bike rides; went to Martha's Vineyard for a really lovely week of beach time, biking, hiking, and no work (the first time since our honeymoon that J. and I spent more than a weekend away from our laptops!). Sam is taller and more articulate, and is very nearly potty-trained during the days.

Two fun verbal things that he is doing these days:

1. for a few months now, he's enjoyed substituting the first letters of words-- he seems to find this hilarious. But now he's doing whole songs this way: "the vipers on the vus go vish, vish, vish... all voo da vown" is a favorite (with first consonants randomly varying across renditions), as is "binkle binkle bittle bar..."

2. he's been making up his own onomatopoeia lately. The other evening in the car, listening to the rain on the roof, he said "mommy the rain is plinkering on the car," which was really just about perfect to describe the sound it was making.

We were in New Hampshire last weekend-- J. had a meeting, and Sam and I tagged along for some foliage-viewing and hiking. Sam and I rode a slow scenic train on Saturday morning:

The view was pretty...

... but two hours is a long time to sit anywhere, and Sam was happy to get off and actually see the engine at the end of the ride.

The hotel we were staying at was on Lake Winnipesaukee. (Note change of pants; still working on aim.) Sam's Red Sox cap misleads people into thinking we have a clue about baseball. I mean, we know they're in the Series, but we're otherwise pretty clueless. Sam just thinks it's a "B for Boston" cap.

That evening we met up with J. and the other folks for a dinner. The meeting was on Squam Lake, and there was a spectacular rainbow, a full (and partially double) arc over the lake.

The next morning, Sam and I went to a nature center and saw some animals in semi-naturalistic captivity. Some colorful views, too:

We met up with J. as the meeting ended, right before lunch. In the afternoon, we went on a short but steep hike to get this view of Squam Lake:

Sam cheerfully climbed up and back down the 2.5-mile trail, and did a little bouldering while we were at the top.

I'll try to post pics more regularly in the next months, but no promises-- lots of work as always, and we're still trying to get the house in shape. At least there's no garden guilt in the winter (but for now, there are plenty of leaves to rake!)

Here's a cute image to leave you with: The Stompers (new daycare classroom) started using scissors this week. His morning teacher told me today that when Sam got the hang of it he spent a long time cutting a fringe along a piece of paper, opening and shutting his mouth in time to opening and shutting the scissors (-:

pretend play + pics

2007-07-31T22:51:00.000-04:00

It seems like Sam's pretend play has taken a real leap lately. We were outside mowing and weeding the lawn this evening (it's little, but I really just can't keep up with it, nor with the garden in general-- but that's another story). Sam was entertaining himself, and me, with an elaborate series: "Who's at the door? There's the doorbell, do you hear it? Ding dong! it's Uncle D. and Aunt S.! They're here! It's their birthday! Here's a cake. Let's put some candles on it... here's (plucking from the grass) a red one, and an ojanj one... Wanna sing Happy Birthday!"

And then in the bath, the little animals he's been playing with for a year suddenly have relationships. Two weeks ago it was "two turtles! there's one turtle and a other turtle!" and then the turtles went under the tunnel ("a leg tunnel!") or went swimming, and one of them was called Cara (after a sea turtle in a favorite video). Now, though, the smaller turtle is the baby, and the bigger turtle is the mommy, and the baby turtle nurses at the mommy (nuzzling her undershell appropriately-- I figure the talk about which species are mammals and what that means can wait another year or so (-: ), and then following our bedtime routine, the baby turtle says "wanna snuggle", and the two turtles snuggle in the water, and then the mommy turtle says it's time to go in your bed, so the little turtle obediently rolls over. It's so fun to watch.

Potty update: after we got to about 80% trained at home, we decided to send Sam to daycare in underpants yesterday. He only had 4 accidents over the whole day (so it's not as though he was dribbling continuously), but he also didn't pee on the potty there, and his teachers both think it's too early for him-- and also that the upcoming (beginning of September) transition to the next room up will be too disruptive. So we're doing underpants (or nothing) at home and diapers at daycare for a while. No reason to be overly ambitious, I guess, and I have to think that the teachers have done this quite a few times by now, so have some idea what they're talking about.

And now for some pictures of Sam eating:

He likes to eat bagels cream cheese-side down:

Gnawing on a t-bone, having eaten a fair proportion himself of the steak on it: (Note new grill just barely visible in the background. We are now Grilling People, and have polished off the remainder of our 1/4 side of beef in gas-grilled yumminess.)

The joys of summer: first Fudgesicle:

Sam takes watering the garden very seriously.

He also insists on doing it "by yourself." Which is generally fine, though we've had to learn the hard way (i.e. the soaking wet way) not to get his attention by calling his name when he's holding the hose.

Sammy says

2007-07-26T13:25:00.000-04:00

House pics forthcoming. In the meantime, some recent conversations:

Today, driving to daycare (we usually bike, but I had to get the car inspected today). It was already warm at 9AM, so I started to roll down the window.
Sam: I want hotter.
me: You want hotter? What's hotter?
Sam, trying again: I want the window UP (motioning emphatically with his hands)
me: You don't want me to open the window, Sam?
Sam: I want to CLOSE the window.

New word coinage: Sam understands making new compound words with novel pairings. For example, a couple of weeks ago he was standing on a book and sliding on the carpet, saying "I riding a skateboard. A book-skateboard!" And the other night, spunky and naked post-bath, he was beating our bed like conga drums, saying "I playing the bed-drum!"

Sam is very attentive to the road when we are driving. He is especially attuned to the red-light-Stop, green-light-Go rule, though his enthusiasm for green (he recently announced, as a light turned, "I love green!") is such that he's not an entirely trustworthy source, occasionally calling out "Green!" to induce rather than announce a light change. As we sat in traffic recently, Sam's monologue went something like this:
"We stopping. We stopped. Gotta watch out for the cars. It's a red light. Turn green later."

And then, heading up the hill after the light turned green, Sam caught sight of one of his favorite types of vehicles:
"Stool bus! Atchally, it's a white stoolbus."
me: "Actually, Sam?"
Sam: "Atchually, it's a white stoolbus."

He's also noting relationships between things. Between familiar items and ones that look similar: Sam points out things that are "Just like yours!" (another bike with a bike seat on the back; a similar car or toy or item of clothing). Between how things are and how they were: spying the CD player off, when the previous day he'd noticed a CD spinning in it, he said "It's not spinning any more." And between two intentions: crawling out from under the table where he'd been hiding, he called out: "Don't bump your head! Don't make peepee on the floor either."

Sam has had naked (pantsless, anyway) time each evening this week, and has successfully pee'd in the potty (which I keep in whatever room we're hanging out in, or in the kitchen if I'm cooking and he's roaming) every time but one. He stops whatever he's doing, warns himself "Don't make peepee on the floor!" and goes and sits down on the potty with an intent look on his face. When he's done he stands up, excitedly, and then we dump the pee into the big toilet, flush, wash his hands, and he gets a Swedish fish or a Pocky stick. He's learning to game the system, though: though I encourage him to sit back down and "let it all out" when he jumps up after a few initial drops, he'll often sit back down post-reward and try to squeeze out another drop or two for another treat. Eh, well, it's working, anyway. I think we'll do an intense couple of days of potty-ing this weekend, and then start with underpants (and laundry) whole days next week. While I'm not looking forward to the cleaning up, nor to needing to know where the nearest bathroom is at Every Given Moment, I am really, really looking forward to being done with diapers! Even just during the daytimes.

new house

2007-07-06T09:53:00.000-04:00

Whew! Well, we're moved. I'll send out a new-address announcement soon, but if you don't get it by the end of the weekend, drop me a note-- I may not have your most current email address.

June was a total whirlwind. We had a nice visit with academic parent-friends from J's old stomping grounds (Pton) and their daughter Edith, whom Sam hadn't seen for a year, but that didn't stop him trying the well known "airplane behind the back" creeping-arm trick (smooth!):

We closed on the new place on the 15th, and immediately started moving stuff into the basement (we set up a row of utility shelves and bought some storage boxes to compensate for the relative lack of closet space, compared to the apartment we were moving out of). Then our friend Antoinette and her mum visited for a few lovely days, being very gracious about the chaos that was our early stages of packing. The day they left, Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. came to stay with us and attend the wedding of a family friend in Boston; they were an enormous help watching Sam over the weekend while we schlepped several more loads over to the new place. Uncle D. and Aunt S. also moved here in advance of Aunt S. starting a grad program in town; they live very close to our old apartment, and it's very very nice to have them in town (not least because they are two of Sam's favorite people). The movers came last Tuesday, the hottest morning of the year so far, and moved the furniture and books. After that, a seemingly endless series of "one last trips" with the car cleared us out of the old place, and then we began the long process of settling in. I think it'll be very good once we're in, and we'll post some pics of the new place then.

In the meantime, some pics and some Sam anecdotes:

The garden at the old apartment, a riot of columbines and a massive clump of irises (sorry, I can't seem to get the second picture to show up vertically...). I think yellow is the color of early spring (daffodils, forsythia), followed by the pinks and purples of mid-to-late spring (cherry trees, tulips, then columbines, irises, apple trees, eventually peonies), joined by oranges and reds in the summer (daylilies, black-eyed susans, etc.).

The new place has a mostly-enclosed garden, and the first lawn we've had to take care of. My push-mower skills will need to develop; we also waited way too long to mow for the first time, so I ended up flattening the long blades of grass as much as I cut them.

When Antoinette was here, Sam did his customary naked post-bath run out to the living room to say "D'night!" I mentioned to the assembled company how sandy he had been, and so she asked him, "Sam, did you have sand on your body? Was it in your belly button?" "No, my tushy," replied Sam (correctly, as it happens-- he must have lay down in the stuff, and it snuck under his waistband in the back). He then proceeded to back up to her, pointing to his naked tush, saying "This my tushy, right here. This my tushy."

Sam has been a big fan of the Allen wrench, most useful in dissembling and reassembling Ikea furniture:

He also loves loves loves to run. A couple weeks ago when I picked him up from daycare, one of his teachers told me that they'd gone to a park with a playground and an enclosed field with a track around it. Apparently Sam just ran around and around the track-- the teacher guessed 15 times. Whew. Which explains his recent monumental food consumption. He also likes to help carrying things, the bigger the better, including the big blue recycling containers, which he manages by himself all around the house and up the five stairs onto the back porch, hefting them one stair at a time.

After all that work, he surely deserves an "ojanj possidul"

He's getting much better at articulating things, which helps a lot with the dual toddler needs of independence--"Do it by self" has finally shown up, and with a vengeance-- and assertion of preferences-- "don't WANT it" is also very much in evidence, as is "wanna X! wanna X! wanna X!" where X = any of a huge number of things, like watching "mahna mahna" on youtube (usually doable, at least the first three times) or staying at the park, or driving the car (not so doable, though he thrills to sit in the driver's seat-- ignition key safely tucked into one of our pockets-- and move the signal-light and windshield-wiper levers and grab the steering wheel). On car-driving: Sam went through a phase of saying "Wanna do the driver!", which made me and J. snicker like 14-year-olds.

He's also more articulate about how he feels; the other day we were walking behind his daycare, where there's a little unpaved path that connects with the paved walkway heading to our department. Sam slipped on a little incline and I caught him, and then asked him if it was fun or scary. "Stary," he said, holding my hand as he trotted on toward "Daddy's office."

Omi and Opa are coming for a visit tomorrow (barring airline cancellations, of which there seem to be an alarming number these days-- fingers crossed they don't get stuck like they did the last time they were trying to visit).

a soft one

2007-05-31T12:49:00.000-04:00

On Monday, as promised, we went to Drumlin Farm. There were sheep, including multiple black ones. We didn't get to touch them, though, so we're not actually sure if they're soft. (The rams were out in this pasture, the ewes/lambs were in a smaller field amongst barns with a sow+piglets ("Mommy pig nursing. Switch sides!"), a cow and calf, lots of goats with kids, and a bunch of chickens.)

The animals were totally eclipsed by the tractor, though, which pulled a wagon with hay bales. This was absolutely the highlight for Sam, though the strutting cock-a-doodle-dooing rooster was pretty cool too. We finished our visit with a picnic on the grass:

And here's an older pic, from Mother's Day on Boston Common:

Recent funny: It had gotten warm outside after a few days of cool rain, and after hearing it from us in the morning, Sam announced "it's hot outside" when we left for a barbecue in the evening. And then, after a bit of reflection, "Blow on it." (like we do to his too-hot food)

And he has taken to saying a very careful "Yesss" instead of "yah". With a wee bit of lisp and drawn-out final consonant, plus a falling tone (so not a rousing "Yess!"), it often sounds incongrously thoughtful ("Sam, do you want a waffle?" "yeesss") or even conspiratorial.

digital snot removal

2007-05-28T20:15:00.002-04:00

At the recent first birthday party of the child of a friend of ours, the father of said friend, an avid photographer, took lots of pictures of the kids there. They just sent us a couple of beautiful pictures of Sam... but his nose has just a wee blob of snot hanging out in every one. So last night I spent a Long Time doctoring the nicest photo. Check out my photoshop skillz:

with snot:

with magically disappeared snot:

baa, baa

2007-05-25T12:44:00.001-04:00

For the past week or so, if he’s feeling mama-centric (i.e. wants only me, and wants me to himself), Sam has been telling Josh to go away in very specific terms: “Daddy go sleep again.” “Daddy go work again.” This morning as he was waking up as I was getting dressed in the room, J. came in, and Sam crankily ordered him “Daddy go pee on potty.” J., trying to be good-humored, asked, “Is there anything else you’d like Daddy to do?” Sam thought for a minute, then added “Daddy go poop on potty.”

On the other hand, last night when J. was wishing him goodnight and told him “I love you,” Sam replied “I love you.” Melting J’s heart, of course. When asked “Who do you love, Sam?” by J., Sam replies both “Mommy” and “Daddy”, but this was the first time we’ve heard the phrase, even if it was just repeating what he heard.

After his bedtime routine (bath, brushing teeth, clean diaper and pajamas in the big bed, reading books, nursing), when Sam rolls off of the big bed into his own bed with his sippy cup of water, we sometimes sing a song or two. Lately he’s been requesting “Baa, baa black sheep”, and as soon as I start singing, he interrupts. We've had this exact exchange 4 or 5 times now:
me: Baa, baa...
Sam: Wanna go see a sheep.
me: OK, maybe some time soon we can go to a farm and see a sheep.
Sam: A black one!
me: Maybe there will be a black one.
Sam: A soft one!
me: Yup, I bet it will be soft.
He seems satisfied with this and so we continue with the song. I think we’ll head to Drumlin Farm some time soon.

Sam got a pull-string wooden puzzle alligator from India, thereby increasing his pull-string wooden alligator collection to two. Which he spontaneously decided he should pull at the same time. He does this frequently these days, clothed or no...

(The soft focus is not me being artsy, it's me figuring out how to use different flash settings on the camera...)

whip it in the bug

2007-05-14T00:14:00.000-04:00

Our (that is, J's and my) friend India visited us this past week, which was a lifesaver because J. was in full-on grant mode, and having another adult around-- especially one who really got Sam, how to communicate with him and entertain him and pacify him-- not to mention one with whom I really really enjoyed catching up on the 3.5 years since we last saw each other-- was very nice. She was preceded by Sam's Aunt L. and by our friend L., both of whom were similarly helpful and lovely to have around. Who could ask for more than guests who bring bottles of wine, cook for us, play with Sam, have ideas for collaborative experiments, do the dishes, help proofread/shorten J's grant, help paint a mural at the daycare, and keep me company? The past two weeks have made communal living seem, well, at least not as far-fetched as it might otherwise.

One of the nights when India was here, I had a bit of a sore throat, so we ordered pizza instead of cooking or going out for something more interesting. I was worrying aloud about the prospect of getting sick, so I. suggested soothingly that I go to bed early and nip it in the bud. Sam loved the sound of that and repeated several times, "Whip it in the bug!" I think I'm going to switch to that formulation from now on.

The next morning at breakfast, Sam was singing nonsense words to himself over his waffle.
India: Is that a song by Sam?
Sam: (pause) Bye, Sam!
India: Bye, Sam!
Sam: Bye, India!

In the week since I posted last, he seems to have gotten first vs. second-person pronouns mostly figured out.

More pics soon; in the humidity we've had recently, Sam's hair gets so curly that he really looks like his daddy.

dribs and drabs

2007-05-06T22:21:00.000-04:00

First, some video of Sam playing mattar while singing happy birthday to himself. Let me know if this doesn't work for you (the whole video link, that is).

Sorry for the long silence-- it's been a busy few weeks. We went to a Seder, painted some Easter eggs, went to a couple of 2nd birthday parties (daycare classmates) and a couple of first birthday parties, got a mortgage. J. and I are mostly finished with our teaching for the semester, though there are still term papers to grade, and finals to write, give, and grade. And J. has a grant due later this month and has been working on it during most of his waking hours, which means I pick up just about everything else, Sam and home-wise (so it's a good thing I put off submitting my next grant til the fall). So it's been a bit crazy. But it's finally getting warm enough to spend long days outside, and Sam and I, at least, have been doing a lot of that.

Recent trip to the arboretum:

(Not sure why these are so blurry; I obviously have to read the manual to figure out my new-ish camera.)

Sam likes to point out all the blooming trees and flowers that he knows the names of (Forsythia! Daffodils! Magnolia!). We take lots of walks around the neighborhood, but he's not a big fan of riding on his new tricycle. This is a combination of not being quite able to work the pedals, and apparently not liking the passivity of being pushed on it (so much for the pricy pushbar features; hopefully he'll change his mind). So he can often be seen pushing his trike down the sidewalk, stretching up to reach the handle of the pushbar.

Alligator!
Two weekends ago we went to our town's Science Festival, where most of the displays and activities were a bit over Sam's comprehension level, but petting a baby alligator was definitely not (the poor thing had electric tape around its snout, but otherwise toddlers wouldn't have been allowed near it!):

(You can see he's being photographed; he may have been in a local paper, but I couldn't find a copy anywhere. Oh well.)

Chatty boy
Sam's all about sentences these days, often catching us by surprise with phrases he seems to have absorbed whole (and is often using correctly) from who-knows-where. Example: tonight after I put him to bed but had forgotten to bring a cup of water, so was filling one for him in the kitchen, Sam calls to me "I'm waiting for you!"

This stuck in my mind because he's still very clearly figuring out pronouns. He asks, "Carry you!" when he wants up, but seems aware that there's something tricky going on with "me" and "you"; in cases where it really matters, he uses third-person (Carry Sam! or Need help Sam!). The other night in the bath, Sam was pouring water between bowls, cooking. "Making pancakes," he announced, and I said, "Mmm, can I have some?" And he said, "For me!" so I repeated, "Can I have some too?" And he smiled big and pointed at me (Mommy, that is), and said "For me!" -- he was making them for me, but using "me" to mean, well, me, and not himself.

He's still working on courtesy words, too. He knows, but usually forgets, to include "please" with requests, and when prompted for a thank-you, he often says "please" instead. When he's very motivated, he'll sometimes come out with combinations like "please, thank-you, welcome, sorry!"

Sam's also fond of jokes these days; one of his teachers reports that Sam specifically asks him for jokes. Sam's thought the words "pickle" and "bagel" were hilarious all by themselves for a while now, possibly due to a couple of silly pickle or bagel-focused books at daycare. More recently, his jokes usually take the form of word play; he and J. somehow latched onto a few nonsense words that they play with, like "bedeezle", which becomes "besnoozle" etc. in many back-and-forths, and Sam will randomly burst out "bedoozer!" when he's feeling silly. He also likes to substitute consonants; he cracked himself up for about five minutes while we were walking home the other night, having called out "Daxi dab!" for a taxi cab, and then repeating to himself over and over (and over and over and over again), "daxi dab" and cackling. And recently he's begun pointing and announcing something he seems to see ("(gasp)! Bobcat!"), making me ask where ("A Bobcat? where? I don't see it!") and then grinning and shaking his head, saying "nooo".

This is after a few weeks of picking up the sounds of words he liked and repeating them over and over, interspersed with "funny word!" For example, once I thought he had diarrhea (falsely, it turned out), and asked him if he did, and on and off for the rest of the day he repeated the word to himself: "Diarrhea! funny word."

Wandering snudge
At home, now and then, he'll pick up a bag, sling it over his shoulder, and announce, "g'bye!" while walking off across the living room. He'll announce it again and again, with the same inflection each time, looking back over his shoulder, until someone says, "Bye Sam! Where are you going?" He always gives one of 5 answers: "To Boston!" or "To the museum!" or "Punjabi Dhaba!" (nearby Indian restaurant) or "going to a restaurant!" or, if he's spoken to Grandma and Grandpa recently, "Going Florida!"

Table manners
Sam's getting pretty good at using a "big cup" (i.e. non-sippy), though away from the table we stick to the kinds with the tops.

And he still loves to eat. Here he is shoveling in some beef saag (successful recent foray back into Indian cooking on my part, and part of a recent experiment in prepping a week's worth of meals on Sunday; note the yogurt! he's not allergic to dairy-- or soy or eggs-- after all, we recently confirmed):

And to close...
Sam enthroned in a carved stump near our apt:

hi from FL

2007-03-27T22:36:00.000-04:00

First, the promised mattar pics:

Cooking with the cuttable (sliceable?) food:

We're in Flarihdah! Sam at the beach:

At a nature center, in the butterfly garden:

Having just polished off most of two huge meatballs and sauce, some spaghetti, and a couple of rolls dipped in the remaining sauce:

(Doesn't he look at least a year older in this one? weird)

Sam is having a blast with his Aunt L., Grandma, and Grandpa. He's being spoiled rotten by gifts and attention and kisses and zrbtts, loves looking for lizards and pointing out palm trees, has learned at least a couple new kinds of vehicles (tractor-trailer truck is the funnest to hear him say) and is loving the warm, sunny weather.

And briefly, the big news: we liked the condo we saw Friday AM, bid on Monday having heard at least two other people were bidding, and found out Monday night that our bid was accepted!! We're moving in June, pending inspections etc. Pics at some future point. It's smaller and further away than our current place, but has a beautiful kitchen and a nice yard, and is still walkable (ca. 25 min) from work. Whee!

Sam is 2!

2007-03-22T12:58:00.000-04:00

Sam is 2!

Omi and Opa didn't make it for the weekend because of the snowstorm that hit us on Friday; they were halfway here in the air when their plane turned around and went back to MN. So we had a slow, restful, somewhat wet weekend, capped by a walk to a burrito joint (Sam loves 'bree-tos' and can eat most of a grilled-veggie-and-bean one, with chips and guacamole on the side). Omi got a ticket to come Monday evening instead, so was here for Sam's actual birthday, but sadly Opa had to work so missed it. Sam opened gifts from them Monday night (we spread things out so he didn't get too overwhelmed, and as wound up as he was Monday night, this proved to be a good plan).

Omi brought a bunch of gifts, and they'd had a guitar sent here. Here's Sam bouncing up and down in anticipation of the opening of the "mattar."

And testing it out, string bass style:

(We attached the strap later, and got video but no still shot yet of him playing it, hands positioned correctly but both hands strumming, bouncing around while singing Happy Birthday to himself. Must take pics to post, and really must figure out how to post video... instructive comments would be appreciated here! this is from a videocamera, not the video function on a regular digital cam...)

Sam's been excited about mattars for a while now, and has been playing guitar on a bunch of his vaguely guitar-shaped toys (push-popper, stuffed giraffe) ever since the music guy started coming to their daycare weekly with his guitar and his fiddle.

The next morning, he opened some books from Omi and Opa, and the pots/pans and wooden cuttable food from us:

He's getting pretty good at unwrapping:

But the trucks and train were still the big winners:

Sam got a lot of truck books this year, including a couple from some friends (thanks, guys! you know who you are). Clearly people are picking up on his obsession... and feeding it, but given that trucks are such salient objects in his life right now-- an outing is totally made by the sighting of a boobozer, for example-- it's not something I was going to fight anyway. It's just: look at him, with his Biiig Truck! in front of his Baskahbaw Hoop! Are we still raising a sensitive, nurturing little guy? He did also seem to like making carrot soup, and likes the general idea of playing kitchen, but cooking doesn't make his eyes light up the way they do when he's scooting along the floor on his knees, pushing a truck in each hand.

We kept Sam home from daycare so he and Omi could enjoy some time together, though I had to be at work for much of the day. Sam opened packages from my grandmother and my aunt, the former including a musical card (ducks quacking "happy birthday" which had Sam entranced for much of the afternoon), and both including Japanese children's books... good for both his vocabulary and mine. Sam knows 2 hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters and at least a couple of words in Japanese, though with the characters he doesn't seem to get that they're part of a different alphabet: he asks for "ah" letter cookies, for example.

In the evening Aunt S. and Uncle D. came over with another present!

Sam helped put it together (check out the birthday t-shirt):

(This-- the toy, not the shirt-- was the first thing Sam looked for the next morning when he woke up; he was a bit concerned when it wasn't in the living room where he'd left it, but was reassured to find it in his room, cars ready to "yoop-de-yoop" and Little People ready to spin around the Ferris wheel.)

Then we had spaghetti and meatballs, one of Sam's favorites:

... followed by carrot cake with 2 candles. Sam knows how to blow on hot food and how to blow his nose, but since he does the former by making a big "ffff" sound, neither of these two skills helped him figure out how to blow out the candles:

We did end up buying Sam a schmancy push-bar-equipped tricycle, but we're delaying giving it to him until he can use it outside, and there's still a bit too much snow on the edges of the sidewalks for that. So much good stuff: he's a lucky, lucky two-year-old. Another mom on a message board I read noted, of her child's recent birthday, that it's easy to see how one slips into spoiling a kid, given how rewarding it is to see their face glowing with delight. I don't feel like we went overboard this year, exactly, but it just seems like so much stuff, and so much excitement, for one kid. I am glad we didn't throw a friend-party this year; time enough for that in years to come, when he's aware enough to ask for it.

Omi had to leave the next morning-- too short a visit!-- so Sam went to daycare, where he had another birthday celebration. Then yesterday evening he got to open some lovely books from a couple of lovely friends (thank you!). The truck page of the big book, and the two truck books, will get loooots of love around here). We disappeared two of them to save for the airplane, because...

... tomorrow we leave for Florida, for some QT w/Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L., some warmth and beach-time, and some more birthday celebrating.

But first, we're looking at an attractive-sounding condo in the morning. A longer walk to work and daycare, but still a doable one, and a pretty neighborhood, if a slightly less urban one. One of the nicest features of our current apartment is that we have most of our needs within walking distance-- small grocery store, pharmacy/drugstore, restaurants, bank, hardware store, even a toy store-- even though our street is relatively quiet. We'd lose at least some of these if we move to this new place. But it's listed for significantly less than we bid on our current place, it has a garden, and it's still walkable to at least some stuff... including a path around a small lake, which would be really nice to be so close to. We may have to bid right away, so cross your fingers for us. And in the mean time, we're in the weird position of having our current apartment shown to prospective buyers regularly, when we have no interest in it selling-- in fact, until we find a better option, an interest in it not selling (so that our landlord returns to our bid). Do we change the poop-smelling diaper trash or leave it there for the day? Do we make the beds before we leave in the morning, even if we're running late? But, if not, can we (me, that is) stomach the thought of strangers seeing 'our' apartment with unmade beds and stacked dirty dishes? Gah. We're walking the fine line between sabotaging efforts to sell the place and doing work tidying, etc., that doesn't benefit us in the least.

Back to Sam: someone on the same message board I referred to earlier noted that many toddlers would fit diagnostic criteria for OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), though different types for different kids: there are the obsessive washers, the ones who don't want anything touching their pieces of food, the ones who wear the same shirt Every Damn Day, etc. Sam's latest is that he wants his bagel half to be all in one piece. He totally lost it over the weekend when we tore his bagel-half into two pieces (to make it easier for him to eat!), and kept crying while trying to push the two pieces back together. And this morning he had another meltdown after he himself tore the bagel-half in half... Not sure whether indulging this is feeding the problem, Josh and I have gotten good at mooshing two chewed-on pieces of bagel back "together" into one. It's really striking, though, how all-consumingly important these things seem (to Sam) at the time, and for now, at least, I'd rather help out with the things that can be fixed, and save the Life Lessons for the things that we don't have control over.

sharks

2007-03-11T19:16:00.000-04:00

I took Sam and his buddy Manu to the aquarium today. I was a little worried that taking 2 two-year-olds (well, one not-quite-two) solo to a crowded public spot would be a recipe for, at best, exhaustion, but they'd done well at the Science Museum with Manu's mom a few weeks ago, so I gave it a try. The only major concession to the 2-toddler thing was that we drove instead of taking public transit; though Sam always loves the trains, I couldn't imagine hauling two sleepy or wired/running kids across 2 transfers on the way back... 65+ pounds of kid. Anyway, I needn't have worried, they were both so well-behaved, and I didn't get seriously lost driving in either direction, which counts as a major accomplishment for me, driving in this town.

Outside by the seals:

[Note Sam's spiffy new haircut. I love Sam's curls, but most of the winter they're not evident because his hair gets squished down by his fleecy hat and stays that way, so he was looking ragged and overgrown. J. was a fan of the whispies (already living vicariously through his son), but Mama wields the scissors... J. says he looks like a Republican now.]

Making the jellyfish glow different colors:

Climbing on the turtles:

The Big Tank:

Another favorite destination is the Natural History museum, with its cases of faded/motheaten but nonetheless thrilling stuffed dead animals. The oddest animals feature in children's books, and Sam was excited to see 3D pangolins (Tails) an uakari (an alphabet book), and a zorilla (ditto), plus the more-standard bison, elephant, giraffe, etc. Here's Sam outside it recently, sporting his usual collection of not-quite-matched red things:

We celebrated J's birthday last weekend. Sam and I left the house (for a walk to the rummage sale at the daycare) and let him sleep in, then met him for an extravagant brunch out, which we walked off while checking out the boobozers outside the museum and the animals inside it. We hung out at home for a lazy late-afternoon, then Uncle D and Aunt S came for dinner. Now we're gearing up for Sam's, which he'll get to celebrate three times: once early with Omi and Opa, who will be visiting for the weekend of their overlapping spring breaks; once on the actual day with us and Uncle D and Aunt S, and once in FL with Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. Lucky duck! I'm still trying to decide whether to get him a little wooden kitchen (to go with the pots and pans and cuttable wooden food) or a tricycle (which I want to get eventually anyway).

Re. the apartment: our landlord, who doesn't want to be a landlord anymore so is selling the place, decided he wants to test the market. He thinks he can do better than what we bid; we can hardly blame him, of course, but the real estate market isn't favoring sellers right now, and we did our research before making our offer. But the end result is that we're looking for somewhere else to buy (would have happily rented here another 5 years, but this having-to-move made us realize that we don't want to be at the mercy of landlords anymore, especially given that we'll probably be in town another 6 years or so). We'll be moving this summer. Fun times.

February

2007-02-27T23:09:00.000-05:00

We had a potluck recently at the daycare. Sam was on familiar ground, and would disappear for long chunks of time, to be found exploring the relatively unfamiliar activities of the infant room, or clapping and bouncing along to his teacher’s band (playing hiphop version of kiddie songs) in the preschool room. As was noted in a couple of separate conversations there, the nice thing about having a party at a co-op daycare means that one can be remarkably comfortable not knowing exactly where one’s child is at any given time, knowing that there are lots of adults around, and that any of them feels comfortable monitoring anyone else’s child. One feels this way to a certain extent in any gathering of lots of parents of small children, but dramatically more so in the co-op setting, or so it seemed to many of us at least. We all had a nice time.
Since I was in charge of organizing food and taking pics (I’m on the “Enrichment Committee”), I also managed to snap one of Sam on the climbing structure in the Toddler Room. Recently instead of saying “whee” when going down the slide, he started calling out “Look out below!” He also says it, a bit heartstoppingly, when he’s going down the stairs. (This and many other things he says that are somewhat surprising he's picked up, I think, from the more exuberant of his teachers—and boy is she exuberant. A bit aggressively so, but most of the kids, at least, seem to love it/her.)

Pensive the other day (and, I think, with a mouthful of cewul).

Trainspotting
When daycare closed early recently due to an ice storm, we all went home together mid-afternoon, and I broke out a birthday present a month+ early: the Ikea train set (a deal at $12.99!), with the thought that he’d be engrossed in it enough to let both J. and I work for a little while. But it backfired: Sam kept getting mixed up by the magnets connecting the train cars, which only work one way, and the tracks, which also only connect one way, and calling for help. “Help train! help track!” Now, though, he’s pretty good at doing it by himself, though he still likes help with the tracks (especially getting it in some sort of connected circle).

Trucks and cars:
Sam is wild about vehicles these days: he plays with the trucks and cars that he has much of the time that he’s home, and when we’re out walking or driving somewhere, he labels all the trucks and other notable vehicles (“Big white truck! Deyivery truck! City bus! yellow taxi! Pickup truck! Ambuyance!”) He loooves to look at pictures of trucks/firetrucks/airplanes/trains on the computer; google image search has become newly useful, as has YouTube. The weekend after the aforementioned ice storm, we were running errands in the neighborhood, and stopped for at least 20 minutes on the corner by the drycleaner watching a Bobcat clean the ice off the pavement. Nearly two weeks later, Sam still occasionally says, out of the blue, "I saw Bobcat! Bobcat kween snow!"

Manipulation:
Sam loves to complete sentences, and does so whenever we pause at key points in books (thereby showing that he has even one-week-borrowed library books largely memorized, though apparently by sound and not necessarily comprehension). J. has discovered that one can turn this to one’s advantage when one’s goals aren’t necessarily the same as Sam’s, e.g. for diaper changes (“No change diaper!”) or leaving the house in the morning (“No jacket!”). “Time to change your...” J. will start, and Sam will, despite himself, call softly “diaper!” and after two or three iterations of this is (a) halfway through a diaper change, and (b) fully complying with the process. Smart daddy.

Final note:
We may be buying our apartment. Like, this week. Eee!

new photos at last!

2007-01-28T22:00:00.000-05:00

But first, some more verbiage:
It’s been single-digit cold, so last Friday I put on my bulky Ecuadorian cardigan, which Sam hasn’t seen yet this year. He looked at me appraisingly as I put it on, said, “Pretty, Mommy!”

Yesterday I was laid out with a bad cold and J. was traveling (again! but for the last time for the next couple of months, at least), so I spent a lot of time on the couch or the futon in whichever room Sam was playing (or watching videos, which he did a ridiculous amount of yesterday because I just couldn't get up to do anything with him at all). Sam kept looking at me concernedly and saying "Mommy too tired."

Later he was playing with his cars/trucks and crashing them into each other head-first, saying "Kiss! police truck kiss!" (smooch) (crash)

Reasons to sleep in the same room as your kid, #45: Last night Sam giggled in his sleep. So cute. No talking, so I couldn’t figure out a context, he just laughed for a little while.

Sam followed up yesterday’s sweet behavior with a burst of toddler wilfulness. I’ve read that the two’s are all about control, and now that we’ve established nightweaning, it’s as though he has to compensate by controlling something else. Sometimes I can give him something appropriate to control and all goes well, and other times I can’t, and all hell breaks loose. Today was the all-hell-breaking-loose kind of day. I'm very glad J. is home, and so is Sam, though for probably only slightly overlapping reasons.

*****

And now for the photos:

Remember how I said that Sam always wants to look at the screen, not be photographed? Here he is going, "See! see!" (As in, "let me")

The easiest times to get pictures of him are when he's engrossed in a book (note recent Most Favored Toy, the big firetruck, within arm's reach). That stuff on his face is facepaint from daycare, where they were doing a unit on wild animals. Sam was a tiger.

If he's on my lap (and engrossed in a book) then he can't even see that I'm holding the camera up! But the perspective isn't so good, except for the nice curly hair.

And of course, I can take plenty of pictures when he's sleeping, a state we have been very focused on for the past week. He's so sweet when he's asleep. And so not sweet when he's tantruming for "Cereal In A Cup!" at 4AM. For an hour.

But just look at that snudgie little hand! Yum.

And he did, indeed, get cereal in a cup (he is obsessed with this faux-wheat-chex cereal from Trader Joe's) the morning after he slept 9PM-7AM without nursing and without tantruming, though not quite without waking up and needing to be snuggled back to sleep. (It's not like he didn't get breakfast the other mornings, mind you, I just didn't mark the occasion with a picture. And yes, he usually eats a proper breakfast sitting at the table, but he was pretty hungry; he's still used to getting a snack of milk at 4ish AM, and without it wakes up Ready To Eat Right Now!)

Yum, ce-wul in inna cup. (I don't know why he duplicates the "in" part but believe me, he does. I have heard that phrase more times than anyone could count in the last week.)

And moothie.

7AM is a totally doable wake-up time (with the added bonus of getting us out the door in time for daycare, as opposed to late like we have been a lot recently) so now we just have to train him to get back to sleep completely on his own. Baby steps, baby steps.

verbiage

2007-01-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

First thing: I figured out why we have so few recent pictures of Sam. Mostly, he moves too fast to be captured; more critically, he loves to look at pictures, including on the screen on the digital camera, so whenever he sees a camera he wants to be on the photo-taking side of it, not the being-photographed side.

A list of random things Sam has said recently:

For a couple weeks now, Sam’s been adding “yah!” to the end of statements when he’s feeling particularly emphatic, like “Want 'moothie (smoothie) yah!” or “See firetruck yah!” So now that we’re re-nightweaning for the nth time (after the most recent attempt was foiled by a few days of the Barfing Flu, the details of which I will spare you, save to say that J. was out of town for all of it and thus didn’t have to deal with any of the lovely ramifications except my exhaustion/frustration when he got back _just_ as Sam was fully recovering), Sam spends a lot of time crying “Nurse! Want nurse, yah!”

Also, this has been the case for months now but I keep forgetting to record it: Sam’s convinced the word for “breast” (as in, what he nurses from) is “side”-- clearly, from “other side” or “switch sides” (which he now says when he’s ready to switch, “fitch side”). For a while, he would wail “Nursie side! Side! Peese!” when he really wanted to nurse.

J. has been calling Sam “Snudge” or “Snudgie” for most of his life now, and we’d been wondering whether he thought it was his name or (given that he clearly knows his name is Sam) what he thought it meant. Now when J. asks him “Sam, who’s Snudgie?” Sam will often answer, “Daddy shudgie!” But the other day when I asked Sam what his name is, he said “Bammashudge!” (Bammersnudge, another nickname from Daddy), and now he refers to himself by a variety of his nicknames: Sammerbammer, etc.

At the aquarium over this past weekend, Sam was excited to point out all the aquatic animals he knows the names of, but was a bit confused by the floating, headless, black wet-suited body of a diver (whose head was above-water as the diver cleaned along the edge of the big tank). I asked, "What's that, Sam?" “Gorilla!”

One of Sam's favorite toys is his Little People school bus (Doolbus!) which he carries around the apartment. He likes to put various things in the bus and wheel them around, and in a recent anti-socks phase yanked both his socks off, put them in the bus, and wheeled them around the kitchen saying "Socks on the bus. Oh, man!"

Sam was watching intently a couple of weeks ago as I opened a package containing a painting by a friend of Uncle D’s, one of my holiday gifts for J. which arrived while J. was gone for a week: “Wow! Wow, pretty. ‘sbootiful. Wow.”

And then this past week, waiting for Daddy outside his office building w/Aunt L, who was in town for the weekend for med school interviews and stayed to hang out with us. It was dark and Sam was starting intently over my shoulder at something saying “Wow,” so I looked, thinking there’d be a firetruck or a bus, but Memorial Hall was lit up, and the lit tower was capturing his attention. “Do you see the tower, Sam?” “Bootiful,” he said, still transfixed.

I wonder what Sam's concept of beauty is... and am so glad that he has one to talk about.

Happy New Year!

2007-01-05T22:53:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2007 brings you joy and good health, and all of us peace.

I also hope it brings Sam’s upper canines, and fast. We had a brief break from the crappy sleep and drool over the holidays after the bottom two broke through, but the nasties came back with a vengeance after a week or so as the top ones starting making their presence known. Grr. All those sleep experts who claim teething doesn’t interfere with sleep should spend a night in our house... or a week. We have been alternating between Motrin and Tylenol (only because the Motrin label says not to use for more than 10 consecutive days). If we skip a night, as often as not, sleep goes to hell, so it does seem like he’s in pain (it’s not like Motrin has any narcotic effects, though come to think of it, maybe that would help). He also occasionally moans, "teeth hurt" or "mouth hurts," (as distinct from the belly-arching, screaming "tummy hurt" of gas, which he's also cried once). I still remember getting my last set of molars at 12 years (not including the wisdom teeth, which were removed before they got too troublesome), and remember the ache and the pressure and the feeling that I needed to gnaw on something to relieve the pain, and I distinctly remembering understanding why babies got so fussy when they were teething. It does hurt (duh). So, hopefully it will be over soon, and the last set of baby teeth (2-year molars) won't come knocking for a few months.

Another month between posts, another long post (and I’m saving 1/3 of the stuff for the next one!). And just one picture, because we forgot to bring the camera when we went to visit Omi and Opa for Christmas (just brought the videocamera—so we did get video of him opening gifts, just not still shots, and we did the same thing at Chanukah because, ahem, only one of us ever wants to be operating a camera). I have to figure out how to post video here.

Conversation of a recent bedtime:
Sam: Chinkaliddah.
me: Jack o lantern?
Sam, smiling, shaking head: Noo. Chinkaliddah! Chinkaliddah!
me: ?? Oh! Twinkle little star!
Sam, smiling: Eh (he never seems to say yes.)
I oblige while Sam lies down getting sleepy.

But as soon as I wind down, he starts again.
Sam: Om-donna-ha-fahm, e-i-e-i-o!
(at least the e-i-e-i-o gives it away)
me: Old Macdonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o
Sam: horse!
me: And on his farm he had a...
Sam (in key): horse
me: e-i-e-i-o. With a ne-e-igh here and a ne-e-i-igh there...
and so on through every animal on the farm and then some, all supplied by Sam, who also usually chimes in for the associated animal sound.

Sam is really into the sounds of things. He’ll stop what he’s doing, look up, and announce, “Hear dog! Hear big dog!” or “hear firetruck” or “hear he’copter” or “hear big truck.” Sometimes I’m fairly sure he’s making it up, as my hearing is pretty good—and we can be indoors in the middle of a quiet evening when he says “Hear big truck! hear firetruck!” so maybe it sometimes means he’s remembering or wanting to hear the thing he’s announcing. One of Sam’s favorite evening activities is to listen to animal sounds online—I have several pages with great ones bookmarked on my laptop.

Sam also loves looking at pictures of familiar people online. He’ll say “See D__. See pitcher Uncle D__.” Or “See Omi” or “See Gappa.” etc. through the various people he knows and has looked at pictures of (not people he knows but hasn’t seen pictures of at home, like friends from daycare). We spend a lot of time scrolling through our iPhoto libraries with him pointing out all his family members.

Another favorite Sam activity is playing hide and seek. As faithful readers will remember from the last post, he’s been a fan of hiding for a while. He’s also taken on the role of looking, but in the same pretend way we did when we were ‘looking’ for him when he was calling out “Hiding!” from the closet. So whether he’s hiding an object or himself, the exchange goes something like this:

Sam: Where he’copter go?
me: I don’t know, let’s find it.
Sam: undah chair? (makes a half-assed attempt to peer under a chair) Nope. Undah yight (light)? nope. Undah table? nope (looking around for more places it might be but patently isn’t) Unda Mommy? nope. Undah Daddy? (Daddy isn’t even in the apartment) nope. (runs into living room, where he hid it) Deah sa he’copter!

Sam can play this game forever. Half of the time he’s hiding the thing under his arm or his leg. Another large percentage of the time he himself is hiding, sometimes reasonably well (in a closet, sometimes even quietly), sometimes just crouching behind something 1/8 of his size, like the humidifer, and sometimes just hiding his face against the wall. “Where’s Sam? Where Sam go?”

We celebrated Chanukah here in mid-December, just lighting candles the first two nights. The first night we exchanged gifts ourselves, and Sam got a baskahbaw hoop (and after repeated games with J. he now says “Sammy’s on fire!” when he makes a basket) and a beanbag pouf for sitting on, as well as a tropical fish poster. The next night we celebrated with Uncle D and Aunt S, had latkes and brisket, and Sam got a huge tub of mega-blocks (toddler size lego-esque blocks) from them, which he loves to dump out on the floor and build towers with.

We then went to Omi and Opa’s house for a week and spent Christmas there. Sam had by this time totally figured out presents, and had a blast at our Christmas Eve gift-opening. He didn’t have a problem giving gifts to other people and was conscripted to hand out presents to the rest of us, and was so enchanted with the toys and books and teddy bear he got, and most especially with the tricycle, that it made the whole evening for everyone. Christmas gift exchanges with a bunch of adults get a little dull: even if one gets lovely things, there’s only so much excitement in “Oh, a sweater! it’s beautiful, thanks!” or “Thank you, this book/CD/calendar is great!” and after a few rounds of this it all seems a bit forced and/or anti-climactic. But the same exchange interspersed with “teddy bear, wow!” (Sam has been adding Wow to things he’s either wowed by or wants us to notice) and his awed/gleeful climbing onto the tricycle—well, it was totally great. He’s not yet old enough to want specific things and be disappointed by not getting them, so we’re in the gift-holiday golden zone. Sam spent the rest of the week riding his tricycle around and around my parents (fortunately one-story) house, not with his feet on the pedals, quite yet, but getting reasonably good at steering while straddling the seat and pushing off with his feet. He also enjoyed all the toys my mother has collected from the consignment shop and the neighborhood charity rummage sale. I got to go shopping with my friend D while Omi stayed with Sam (and D’s dad stayed with her 3 kids), J. got to write mostly uninterrupted for the whole week, and J. and I got our annual Xmas-gift massages while Omi watched Sam yet again. Good times were had by all.

One photo to end, the same theme as the photo ending the last post:

new stuff

2006-12-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

Sorry, we've been a little busy over here.

As noted, Sam was sick for a whole week, and since then I've been scrambling to try to catch up on all the work I fell behind on. I think part of the nature of academia (and maybe other professions, I really only know this about academia) is that there is more work than one could ever really hope to get done, and so one ends up chronically feeling like one could and probably should be doing more.

While Sam was sick, he liked to sleep with his head on our bed, either resting on his knees with his cheek on our mattress, or else like this:

It looks pretty uncomfortable to me, and I tried to put a little pillow under his back to support him, but he'd move somewhere the pillow wasn't, so I guess it was working for him.

The week after Sam was sick was Thanksgiving, and J's parents and sister, and my brother, all came and stayed with us, and J's brother and sis-in-law came for the day on Thursday and also hung out with us on Saturday. A 20-lb turkey from Stillman's Turkey Farm was successfully roasted, and served with two stuffings (kale/dried fruit/hazelnut/whole wheat bread, and bread/pinenut/tarragon, both featured in the previous week's NY Times, and both tasty), sweet potatoes baked with ginger and maple syrup, the best gravy I have ever made and which I must remember to make in the future (from The Best Recipe, which is usually a tad boring, but reliable for stuff like roasting and gravy), and cranberry-orange-ginger sauce. Grandma and Aunt L. made the family-recipe broccoli-corn casserole, yum, and Grandma brought her justifiably famous pumpkin-cranberry bread. We started off the meal with squash-apple soup and the bread, followed by a nice salad that J. made. For dessert, a delish pumpkin pie that J. also made. Lots of orange-colored food, and much gluttony. Oooh-- and I discovered my old favorite blended table wine, which I found while working weekends at a gourmet food shop in the SF Bay Area, at the local Trader Joe's. Big House Red. It went very nicely with the turkey. I think I might have to pick up a case... it's that yummy (and so cheap!)

The rest of the time we hung out and talked, and ate leftovers, and went to a nice museum in town, and looked at ducks and geese by one pond, then the next day at another pond, and went shopping a bit (well, everyone else humored me by looking around while I bought these boots I'd been eyeing for a long long time and finally decided to buy... and boy do I love them. Mmmm. Comfy, no heel, but still styley.) and out to dinner. Sam totally thrived on all the attention, and a week later is _still_ asking for More (M., my bro) and More (L., J's sis). And points out Grandma and Grandpa in pictures. They're doing a family unit in daycare this month, and making family trees from photos we printed out and brought in, so that's great timing-- especially since we're going to see my parents later this month.

It was especially nice to see my brother, since he's moving to Japan to (finally!) join his wife later this month, so I will see him even less often than I currently do. But I'm very happy that they get to be together again-- they haven't lived together for, geez, I think a couple of years now.

The night after everyone left, we restarted Project Nightwean, which we'd initiated with some success a month prior, but then after two weeks (by the end of which Sam could be soothed back to sleep during his one usual 1-or-so AM wakeup with just a bit of talking and a pat on the back) he got sick, and in his stuffiness and screaming and dehydration I started nursing at night again, and wow, stopping again after that was HARD. There was a LOT of crying in the night last week; J. moved back into the bed in the guest room just so we weren't both totally exhausted, but by the third night of angry yelling-for-hours, I couldn't handle it alone any more either. Between that and the previous week of nightly nose-suctioning with accompanying screams and howls of protest, our neighbors surely think we torture our child regularly. But hey! now J. can put Sam back to sleep when he wakes up, as was demonstrated twice last night before midnight (yeah, we're still working on not having any wake-ups at all) and I'm not exaggerating at all when I say I danced in the living room as Sam eased quickly back into dreamland without me. Evening outings for me!!! Whee!!! Um... and at the least, some less-interrupted sleep. We are DEFINITELY doing this earlier with the next (gah! next!) kid.

In other Sam news, he's basically recovered from the nasty virus, but he now has conjunctivitis, which has been cycling round the daycare since he started there, it seems, so it was only a matter of time. It's viral, but they're allowed back after 3 applications (i.e. 24 hours' worth) of antibiotic eyedrops, so the ped. prescribed them over the phone this morning... but then cautioned that he's still totally contagious, because of course antibiotics don't touch viruses. So we have a dilemma: do we bring him to daycare knowing that he's contagious? or keep him home, thus losing even more work hours, when he (a) is totally perky and not much bothered by his slightly-red and gently-oozing eyes, and (b) clearly picked up the virus there, so it's not like he's bringing it in where it hasn't already been. I'm leaning towards bringing him in, clearly... Thoughts? Am I a bad daycare citizen? The ped. laid out the choice very clearly, and basically exactly as I put it here; she didn't say what she would have done, but she didn't tell me not to bring him in, either.

I have the same thing, though a milder version (and his isn't particularly bad, either); I do have to wear my glasses, though, which I really hate. I'm going to have to exacerbate the irritation by wearing contacts tomorrow-- I have my first haircut appointment in something like 9 months and I can't possibly show up at the Hip Salon wearing my Old Dorky Glasses.

In other meat news (other, in addition to the turkey discussion above, you see?): Stillman's Farm is starting a meat CSA, so we have a good source of pastured/sustainably-farmed/humanely-raised meat, finally, and our neighbors N. and M. picked up the 1/4-steer we'd ordered from River Rock Farm over Thanksgiving weekend, which they're splitting with us, so we now have nearly a quarter-cow, butchered and neatly wrapped in labeled paper packages, in our chest freezer in the basement. (I'm including all the links because we've been really happy with both the meat and the people raising/selling it at both places, and we feel really strongly about doing as much as we can to support local farmers who are growing food in sustainable, humane ways).

Speaking of food, here's a pic of Sam from about a month ago. He's enjoying a smoothie I whizzed up with juice and frozen blueberries and maybe a banana, I can't remember exactly-- he had some with a spoon, and then some in a cup, then he poured from the cup into the bowl, and back and forth, sampling and "mmm!"ing all the time.

Sam is all about combining words these days, which makes him seem more and more like a Kid, and not a Baby. Everything is "big" (as in "big truck!" "big bear!") even if it's not really big, or else modified by its owner ("Mommy boots" "Daddy swippers" "Sammy hat") or a color ("owange tayon"). And he announces his actions-- whenever he's angry, or just feels a lack of attention, he says "hit mommy" or "hit daddy" or even "hit car" or "hit book", sometimes but not always accompanying his announcement with the act (always reprimanded, of course), and requests specific actions like "Mommy readdabook". When he enters his daycare classroom, he calls out happily, "Hi, Sam!" , and when he leaves, or pretends to leave, he says "Bye, Sam!" but he does say to the fish, "Hi, Fish" and says "bye, (name)" whenever he's saying bye to anyone. [Added later: right now Sam and J. are building another arch. While orchestrating the delicate brick balance, J. sometimes asks Sam to hand him a brick of a certain color, and Sam complies, calling out "Tenkyu Sam!" (Thank you, Sam) as he helps out.] He also repeats the end of about anything we say, multi-syllabic words especially ("capable!"), with a little smartypants grin, so our carefree gossiping/snarking days are just about over. He is a big fan, already, of "no", which he says whenever asked a question by someone he's anxious about (i.e. anyone new), and in some moods when asked any question by anyone at all. And he loves to hide-- he slides into one of two favorite hiding places, and then calls out "Hiding!" or "Where's Sam?" until one of us starts "looking" for him, narrating our search as we go: "Where's Sam? Is he under the bed? Is he outside the window? Is he in the bathtub? Is he in Daddy's closet? Is he in Mommy's closet? Hey! Here he is!" whereupon he immediately says, "More hiding!" meaning he stays there, and we begin the "search" process again.

Whew! What a novel! Next time I'll post more pics; our recent ones haven't come out very well, not sure why, so I'm scrambling to find November and December pics to put into a new Sam calendar...

Sam and J. reading Sam's latest library-borrowed obsession, the Hanukkah Bugs pop-up book. The library version, predictably, is missing some pop-up features, so we may have to acquire our own copy:

virusland

2006-11-19T23:01:00.000-05:00

Oof, what a week. Those eye boogers? viral, not very contagious, but just the advance signs of a Very Bad Cold that's had Sam feverish, snotty, coughing, cranky, and out-of-sorts all week. So, no daycare, no birthday parties, and no sleep for any of us-- he'd wake hourly, choking on mucus, and our efforts to help him breathe (propped on pillows and even, when we got desperate, in his carseat in the crib; humidifier running all night every night; Motrin, with or without decongestant; lots of fluids; warm baths; sitting on the edge of the tub with a hot shower steaming up the bathroom at 3AM; suctioning his nose; saline drops) weren't doing much. He'd nurse back to sleep then wake again an hour or less later, screaming in frustration. I haven't been this tired since he was a brand newborn. J. retired to the guest room because Sam just wanted to nurse when he woke, so there wasn't much J. could help with, and at least that way we weren't both psychotic with exhaustion. Last night was moderately better after an extended flush-and-suck session with the bulb syringe (the sight of which now makes Sam yell then bury his face somewhere out of reach, like his hands or my leg).

Snot is fascinating, eh? It's like the poop stories of the first few months.

Anyway, his fever is finally gone, but we're finishing up a course of antibiotics prescribed when Sam's lungs sounded a bit fluid-y on Thursday, and since he hasn't been eating or drinking well all weekend, I'm going to keep him home again tomorrow so he can get fortified before picking up the next nastybug at daycare. (Work? who needs to work? Grrr...) Fortunately, he doesn't have any clue that he missed two birthday parties this weekend.

Now I just have to figure out how to not get sick myself. At least when I have to flush out my own sinuses, I won't need someone to hold down my arms while a second person stabilizes my head with one arm while wielding the bulb with the other... I'm awaiting a call from CPS any day now when our (childless) upstairs neighbor can't take the howls of protest any more.

In non-bodily-fluid news, we picked up our locally-grown, pastured turkey today (from Stillman Farm), as well as groceries for our Thanksgiving meal. Sam's Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. are flying up, and Aunt S. and Uncle D. are driving over on Thursday; my bro (Sam's Uncle M.) is coming up too.

eye boogers

2006-11-14T23:42:00.000-05:00

Sam's long-running cold has morphed into a more aggressive upper resp infection; I was called to pick him up from daycare on Monday afternoon because his eye boogers (spreading up from infected sinuses) looked too much like conjunctivitis for them to risk contagion, and then last night he had a fever. So I'm home today; J. gave my exam to my class this morning while Sam and I saw his ped. (confirmed it's a likely viral infection, take it easy and warm compresses for the eyes); we then hung out and read books and watched Fantasia while I sorted 5 months worth of credit card receipts and did other general filing. Ugh. I love the feeling of having all my paper organized and neatly put away, but filing stuff like credit card statements and car insurance paperwork never seems high enough priority to make it to the top of the to-do list and it's too easy to let piles build up instead of staying on top of it, which would of course be more efficient. But I can't really work while hanging out with Sam when he's in a cuddly/cranky state, so whee, the piles are gone.

This is the second ped visit in as many weeks; last week he had a rash that showed up a day after I slathered him with a buttermilk-based 'sensitive skin' lotion. Though it might just be the (mild) fragrance he's allergic to, it might also confirm his suspected dairy allergy; in any case, we needed a note stating that _that_ wasn't contagious.

Between the goopy eyes and the rash, we have no new pics, but here's an old one from the new camera, from about a month ago when Sam was still in his hat-obsession phase (he still likes hats, but no longer puts anything on his head and announces "hat" the way he's doing in this pic):

Grandma, Grandpa, and Aunt L. visited last weekend for Uncle D's surprise birthday party and are coming again next week for Thanksgiving. I'm so, so glad that Sam is really getting to know his grandparents and aunts and uncles. I only know one grandmother out of all my grandparents, and though I know all my uncles and aunts, all of them live an ocean away in one direction or another, and so we very rarely get to share holidays and birthdays.

This past weekend we were uncharacteristically social: J. and I had a date on Saturday night, an early movie (Borat, our first dose of pop culture-while-it's-still-pop in years) and quick dinner while Sam played happily with his new babysitter. On Sunday we had our neighbors and another family over for brunch and lingered most enjoyably into the rainy afternoon talking with them. Then that evening we met another family with a toddler at a nearby restaurant which caters to the family-with-young-kid crowd with a stocked play area and kids' menu, but also has good food and a wine list. This coming weekend is Sam's social weekend, assuming he's all better by then: he's got the birthday party of one classmate on Saturday, and another on Sunday; he's also spending some time on Saturday morning with his babysitter while I participate in the semi-annual "parent work weekend," painting and renovating his daycare classroom.

Sammy Spider

2006-11-01T09:49:00.000-05:00

Kind of hard to make out the details, but here's Sam in spider mode last night. We didn't go trick-or-treating, but visited our friends in the house next door. Sam totally got the idea of the costume, too, somewhat surprisingly ("Sam, what are you? What's Sammy?" "Pider. Sam pider.") I brought it to Costume Day at daycare today (they don't do holidays, but the kids could bring in costumes today for a parade and some trading-costumes dress-up time).

punkinhead

2006-10-28T22:01:00.000-04:00

Just a few recent pics.

We decorated a Sukkah at Sam's Aunt N and Uncle J’s house (where he got to meet his third? cousin Nate. Aunt N is Grandma’s first cousin, and Nate is her grandkid, so Sam and Nate are the same generation, 3 cousinships removed.

And his pumpkin hat from M. still fits! yay! and his chickens sweater from D. and family, which they gave us when he was born, fits perfectly now! He kept going 'bok bok bok' all day, and also no longer yanks hats off his head instantly, so we were able to get this cute pic:

Sam really likes the program AlphaBaby (and it’s freeware for Macs!) It prints whatever letter key he hits in colorful caps while cuing the computer voice to say the letter out loud. If he hits non-letter keys, shapes come up with a random mac noise.

(And no, we don’t as a rule let him play with the laptop on his own, I just backed up to take the pic.)

He's still a fan of kneebouncers , too, and requests "tains!" frequently when he sees one of us at our laptop (which, um, he sees a LOT. The glowing Apple logo is probably the most recognizable brand in his world, right now...)

What is it with the stuffing-the-mouth-too-full-to-chew thing? Sam does this at least once a meal, and then gets frustrated and spits out the entire contents onto his tray. It’s like he’s so excited to be consuming food that he loses track of the mechanics of it—food into mouth, chew, swallow, repeat- and gets stuck at the first step: food into mouth, food into mouth, food into mouth...

Omi is visiting, cooking us tons of yummy food and watching Sam so his parents can get more work done. This morning we went to the pool together (though it was a bit cold—it took Sam a while to stop clinging to me and shivering—and parking by the university athletic center? nonexistent. So irritating. But I digress...) then ran a couple of errands in pouring rain while Sam conked out in his carseat. Then Sam and Omi played all afternoon, building towers and tunnels with his blocks, coloring, cutting playdough shapes with the cookie cutters, reading books, eating strawberry Pockys (treat from Omi, which he looooves). Then while Omi and I were making dinner, J was inspired by the block tunnel to go one better than his big towers of late—he made an arch. (And Sam ran around afterwards announcing, “arch! arch!” which had to have been gratifying.)

Here's Sam dancing (to "Cows", of course) with his monkey, in front of the arch:

sniff

2006-10-15T22:39:00.000-04:00

Sam's overall-clad behind was wet when I took him out of his booster seat after dinner tonight, and I wasn't sure if it was leaked pee (it had been, upon reflection, fairly long since his last change), spilled apple cider that had missed his bib pocket, or something else. J. remembered having sat him on the edge of the sink to wash hands before dinner. So I asked J. to smell it and see if it smelled like pee, cider, or nothing, and J. obligingly got down on hands and knees and sniffed Sam's behind. Sam found this very amusing: "Dog!" he announced, giggling.

We had a beautiful weekend with lovely sunny crisp-air fall weather. I decided I needed a bit of a break, so had resolved not to do research-work or teaching-work, or at least not much, so we just crossed domestic items off the list. It was our turn to clean the Toddler Room at Sam's daycare (it's a coop, which means not only weekly help shifts, but also a cleaning weekend which rotates through all the families-- it works out to roughly once a semester, which feels totally doable), so we did that yesterday. We went to the Farmer's Market, did laundry, had dinner at the home of a colleague. Today J. worked all day and Sam and I went for a bike ride and ran errands. He seems to be comfortable in the bike seat, and the area around our home is very bikeable, so I think we'll be doing that a lot until it starts snowing. We had lunch at home-- Sam's been eating like a horse, protein especially ("chit-ten! meat! more!"). I think he must be growing. Then this afternoon, he slept for an astonishing 2.5 hours, during which time I started-- and finished!-- the novel I got at the library yesterday morning. (I've taken to reading young adult fiction when I have a fiction craving, because it lets me do just this-- finish a novel in, if not a single nap, a nap + an evening. There are some fantastic writers targeting books towards 'young adults'. I loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy last year, and just found another couple of his books. Yum.)

Sam's newest library favorite: Leo Lionni's Let's Play . I also got out Tomie de Paola's Strega Nona, which I remember loving, but Sam wasn't so into it-- too many words. And also a Babar book, but every time I read Babar now, it strikes me as oppressively colonialist and patriarchal. I have no problem with elephants wearing clothes in, say, Richard Scarry, or dressed up animals in so many other books (Toot and Puddle!) but in the first Babar book, Babar the King doles out clothing to all his previously clothes-free subjects, a set of work clothes and a set of fancy clothes, and it marks the occasion of the incorporation of the elephant town. For some reason this creeps me out. Maybe I'm just hypersensitive after reading this amazing article about the unintended consequences of human attempts to manage elephant populations.

tay-onz

2006-10-10T22:04:00.000-04:00

We survived Sam's bout of fever with much coloring and some videos. I got some closets organized during my enforced at-home time, and we took some walks and ran some errands, and he's all better now. Sam really, really likes drawing. They do a lot of art at daycare, and most days there are pages of painting and stuff-glued-on-paper and occasionally Sam's careful pen scribbles to take home. He has progressed from mostly ordering us to draw stuff to mostly drawing stuff himself, though he still does request specific things a lot: buses, suns, owls, walruses, horses, Daddy, Sam (never Mommy, for some reason), various letters, and always the old favorite, fans. Here he is after I was called to pick him up from daycare last Tuesday, his fever having returned after being down for most of Monday (fortunately, the call came just after I was finishing my back-to-back lecture and talk). We hung out at home for the rest of the afternoon and spent much of Wednesday, during which he felt totally fine and fever-free but couldn't return to daycare because of their 24-hour post-fever rule, enjoying the gorgeous fall weather. (Mind you, I'm not complaining about the 24-hour rule. If it saves us Sam catching just one virus from another kid, I'll happily keep him home an extra day when he's sick himself.)

The past few weeks, Sam has been starting to get into pretend play. He's been putting random things on his head and declaring "hat!" (which is cute when it's a bucket, or a ball, or a mixing bowl, but less cute when it's a fork full of saucy pasta). And he's been playing this game in the bath: he takes his turtle (squeezy bath toy) and sticks it under his thigh, announcing "house!" Then he'll pull the turtle back out, and say "There it is!" (Daydis!) Then back under his leg, "house" or, sometimes, "chair." Then Daydis! He can do this 30 times in a row and not get bored, but it's far better if I'm playing along, of course.

I also realized that Sam doesn't necessarily recognize himself when he's saying "Sam!" in the mirror. He must recognize himself to some extent because he points himself out in pictures, but correctly names the pictures of the other kids at daycare. But occasionally, he'll point to an unfamiliar picture of a baby or little kid and say "Ham!" And on another one of our post-fever Wednesday excursions, to get sweet potato fries at a burger shop after running some errands, Sam spied a bust of Elvis and cried out with excited recognition, "Ham!"

2 things, 2 pics

2006-09-30T23:56:00.000-04:00

GEB posted eloquently a couple of days ago about the recent Senate display of cowardice (or whatever it is called when people utterly fail at their jobs in order to continue to hold their jobs). Ugh.

In snudge-related news, though, I have two cute things to report.

When Sam says words that begin with an "S" sound, he pronounces them as though they begin with "H". He has no trouble saying word-final S's, or S's in the middle of words, but he'll sit on a step or stool and say "heat!", or will call loudly "huck!" when he's trying to get somewhere and can't make it through. (That's "stuck" for you not fluent in toddler-ese.) You can probably see where this is going... just this week, he's started looking in the mirror, or at his image in photos or on J's laptop background, pointing, and exclaiming, "Ham!" Hee.

This morning, J. was shaving, and Sam wandered into the bathroom holding his baby doll*. J. asked if he wanted to dance with the doll. We've both, especially J., been dancing while holding Sam since he was mere weeks old, to lots of different kinds of music, but often (and beloved by S.) to Boynton's "Cows" song from the Philadelphia Chickens album. Aaaanyway, Sam promptly started bouncing while holding the doll up, going "doo doo doo" just like his Daddy does when he sings "Cows, du-doo doo doo, We're remarkable cows..."

* Yes, we are the kind of parents who buy our male child a baby doll. It's blue, though, not pink. But duh, we want him to develop his nurturing side. And it's working, see?

We had more than 40 people over, not including babes-in-carriers/arms, for a housewarming party today. It was a good way to make ourselves finish setting the place up, and to sort-of acknowledge all of the dinner-invitation debts we've managed to accrue already. But Sam seemed more cranky and clingy than usual, even given the crowd (and had been whiny all morning before a long nap), and sure enough by half-way through the party, he was feeling distinctly warm. Another kid at his daycare was out with a fever Thursday and Friday, and it looks like the virus found another home. Grr... J's traveling all week, and I have to give two lectures and a talk... should be interesting.

In a happier vein, here are two recent pics. More coming when I figure out how to download pics from my new camera.

Spunky in overalls:

Last night after his bath, Sam spontaneously decided that doing splits (he can't quite manage one, but comes close) is fun. (Not the greatest pic, but I hope you can figure out what he's doing here.)

daycare

2006-09-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

After 2 weeks, Sam seems to have really settled into daycare. We started gradually: the first day I stayed for about an hour then just left him for a half-day, and the rest of that week I stayed about a half-hour each morning then left him for about 6 hours (9:30-3:30) before picking him up. He still sobbed each time I left, but when he did, one of the teachers would hold him and comfort him, and when I returned he would be playing and have napped/eaten/etc., but he'd be clingy as soon as I got there and very ready to leave. I resolved to give it two weeks to see if he started liking it more. The second week he still cried 'mum mum mum' each time I left, but again was being comforted by a teacher, so I'd stay 15 minutes or so, and they reported that he cried less than 5 minutes after I left. He would be playing actively and happily when I got there to pick him up at the end of the day (5-ish). Well, this week, he's stopped crying altogether. One of the teachers, I., figured out last week that bubbles in the morning really helps distract the kids who have separation anxiety-- so much so that by Thursday or Friday of last week, Sam was saying "bubbles" in anticipation on the stroller ride to daycare in the morning. On Monday, Sam happily ran up the stairs of the slide as soon as we got there, and gave me a hug goodbye when I left then ran back to the slide. Yesterday he was dancing in bubbles when I headed out the door, and today he barely looked up when I gave him a kiss. Yay!

He's been steadily learning words, including ones that I'm pretty sure he picked up at daycare. But yesterday we got the first concrete evidence of Good Habits he's learning there: after getting home, nursing on the couch, and reading a book, Sam was wanting to read more books but I needed to start making dinner. He'd been running around with a book he was wanting me to read, but when I offered him a snack, he abruptly turned around and headed for the bookshelf, put the book back on the shelf with absolutely no urging or even suggestion from me while saying eagerly "cacka!" (cracker), and then ran into the kitchen to receive some cackas. I've noticed that the daycare gently but consistently enforces cleaning up before mealtimes or before going outside, and it was so nice to see that he's internalized that habit. We'll have to enforce it at home to keep it up.

In less desirable things learned at daycare, Sam seems to have learned to hit (from another kid there who's been hitting everyone since the first day). I think these things are epidemic in group-care settings, and hitting is at this point less worrisome than biting (just because less harm can be done by an uncoordinated slap than by a sharp set of little teeth), another common epidemic, but it isn't fun, and it's hard to enforce consequences at home when the consequences at daycare are different. (I'd been leaving the room for a few moments each time he slapped me before, but with other kids that doesn't make any sense-- if they're slapping in competition over a toy or over slide-access, for example, then removing the victim only helps the aggressor.) They do teach "gentle", and I'm sure the slap-happiness will fade eventually.

No pics to post today, but I finally bought myself a three-months-late birthday present of a tiny pocket-size digital camera, because our very nice digital SLR is just too cumbersome to bring to the park every time I go. My new camera was surprisingly inexpensive and did I mention it's tiny? So I'm hoping to have a lot more snapshots to share from now on.

no tusks, thank goodness

2006-08-31T10:33:00.000-04:00

This morning J. was getting dressed and Sam was wandering around in his dinosaur jammies. Sam looked up at J. at a key moment, pointed, and said what we first thought was "balls" (leading us to wonder where he learned that), then repeated himself more clearly, at which point we understood him to be saying "walrus".

some things

2006-08-28T17:39:00.000-04:00

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and was inspired to finally get our list in order by that posted by a friend and fellow mama-blogger (hi, G!). Um... cause you want to know what words Sam knows, right? And I feel the need to prove that Sam is following in his parents’ verbose footsteps. So, here is our best estimate of his current spoken word list. It’s a moving target, not only because he keeps learning new ones, but also because some of the ones that he was saying reliably for a while, like “ppps” for poops, he hasn’t said in months (I took a couple of items like that off the list). There are also some sounds he makes many times in a row with some urgency but which we haven’t been able to tie to English words yet so, clearly, I haven’t included those.

A
all done (ahdun)
baa (refers to sheep, but answers this too when asked what they say)
ball (baw)
bath
beach
bear (beah)
bed
bee
bike
bird (burr)
boat
book
boot
bottle (boh)
bowl
bread
bug
bus
buzz (as in what a bee does)
bye
car (dah)
cat (dah-- vowel shorter than for car)
Cock-a-doodle-doo (doodledoo)
cold
corn (torn or norn)
cup
D
Da
deer
dog (doh)
door (doah; also says this when referring to someone arriving or leaving)
drink (dink)
duck
dust
Erin (ein)
fan
fire (fah)
fish (fff)
flower (oh)
frog (fah)
gears (deas)
Giulio (Gi-oh)
hat (dat)
hot (hoh hoh, from my “hot hot”)
juice (duis)
keys (tees)
Liz (iss)
M (mum)
Mama (or lately, Mom)
mm (for cow saying moo)
mmm (when eating, to denote tastiness)
moon
more (moa)
mouse
mouth
nurse (erss; except at night, then nuurrrs)
O
octopus (pus)
Opa (Pa)
owl (wol)
pen
penguin (peng)
phone (hone)
pig
please (pees)
quack (cak or dak)
rabbit (rah)
ribbit (frog sound)
rice
S
shoes (doos)
snort (pig noise)
soap (ohps)
stairs (deahs)
star (dah)
tea
this (is)
toe
train
tree
truck
uh-oh
up (bababa, from up up up, which is what I say when picking him up)
walrus (!!)
water (wah)
whale (weah)

In other news, we just got back from our four-day family vacation in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, with our buds G. and A. We had a lovely time, enjoyed the beach one day (note “beach” above) and a beautiful dune-winding bike ride (note “bike” above) followed by a bit of time on the bayside beach (see below), and shopping and people-watching in between.

On the rainy middle day we were saved by the discovery of a fantastic children’s area in the public library, where we spent many hours lounging on beanbags talking to other parents and letting Sam enjoy the toy-filled zone (which included the best stocked play puppet theater I’ve ever seen). On the rainy end day we went for a walk. Sam spent a lot of time in the ergo on this trip. He likes the ergo-- when I ask him, as we head out for a walk/errands, whether he would rather go in the stroller or the ergo, he usually picks the ergo. It's easier to deal with stairs/narrow store aisles for me, too, and it's keeping my quads and glutes in decent shape...

We ate well, and also found that the best way to keep Sam entertained in restaurants while awaiting food is to draw/write with a pen on any piece or scrap of paper. He alternates between grabbing the pen and rendering stuff himself (“ff!” “baw!” he’ll announce as he completes a scribble) and holding it out demanding specific things to be drawn (fan! duck! walrus!) and letters to be written (A! S!).

Sam is also obsessed with going up and down stairs, which he prefers to do one at a time the way big people do, not step-level-step-level like someone whose knee barely reaches the next stair would be expected to. (And yes, he needs to hold someone’s hands in order to do this. There was much holding of Sam’s hands up and down stairs in P-town.) The trip was too short, but it’s nice to know that it’s so close—just 90 minutes by ferry. I’m sure we’ll be back. And in the meantime, we may be in the market for a bike trailer (in any case, we’re getting a bike seat for him on the back of my back, to facilitate getting to and from daycare, starting next week).

And one more pic: as promised earlier, here's Sam dancing at Aunt S. and Uncle D.'s wedding in May. We don't have video (and I haven't yet figured out how to link video here), which is a pity, because he was a wild dancing party animal for an hour and a half.

Japan pics 2

2006-08-03T11:36:00.000-04:00

After the wedding, we went with Aunt R's family to the nearby harbor town of Otaru for a day, then drove across Hokkaido to the hot spring resort town of Noboribetsu. Japanese baths, including those at hot springs, are deep and hot, like hot tubs. One washes completely first outside the tub (at a spigot or now, with a hand-held shower, sitting on a little stool), then gets in to the tub for a nice long soak. The baths are usually communal-- at home, the whole family soaks one after another (thus the washing beforehand-- the water stays pretty clean); at resorts, all the guests, separated by gender, enjoy the same tub or few tubs. Sam was a big fan, and at the hot spring resort, he got to really indulge. Omi took him in while I got to relax a bit, and as she dipped his feet into one of the less-hot tubs, he demanded "moa!" again and again until he was standing on the bottom (and in up to his neck), at which point he grinned happily. There were lots of other naked kids running around and enjoying the bath amongst all the women soaking, and Sam got over wanting to nurse every time he saw my boobs. For my part, there is nothing that rids one of self-consciousness quite like seeing 50 other naked women, aged 3 through 93, with a life's worth of scars, stretch-marks, and sagging, all relaxing together in the water. Then we padded back to our rooms in the resort-provided cotton kimonos that everyone wears at resorts. Here's Sam in his:

We also spent some time wandering around the touristy little town in a drizzling rain, buying souvenirs. There was a big statue of an oni (demon/god) of the nearby volcano, which became animated every hour on the hour for a few minutes of flashing eyes, scowling face, and swinging arms. Here's oni-Sam:

Sam also enjoyed Japanese kids' meals, which are served on cute melamine trays and usually have either spaghetti or fried rice, along with some protein and fruit (and almost never vegetables). Sam can take or leave fruit (actually, usually leave-- he will rarely eat it, except in smoothies), generally eats but doesn't exclaim about veggies, likes meat, and loooves noodles and/or rice. Here he is enjoying some spaghetti (and of course, we had forgotten to bring a bib):

(Why yes, that is is a hot dog cut to resemble an octopus-- how did you know?)

We spent two days enjoying the baths and the town and taking short hikes nearby, then Tante G. and Onkel S. flew back to Germany, and we flew back to Tokyo and rejoined Obaachan (nickname for my grandmother) in Chiba. We spent a few more days at her house, doing a bit of shopping and relaxing and watching soccer, and a lot of playing with Sam’s soccer ‘baw’ outside in her garden. Then we flew back to Omi and Opa’s house in Minnesota. I packed the Benadryl in the wrong bag, though, so was very glad when Sam fell asleep 6 hours into the (12-hour) flight.

After an afternoon and a night in MN, it was time to see Daddy again and to move into our new home in Massachusetts! J. had met the movers at our new apartment while Sam and I were flying back to the States, and was going to spend the day unpacking while we traveled from MN via Philly to MA. But Philly was having such bad weather that all flights in and out of the city were grounded for half of the day. So we spent 4 hours in the plane on the tarmac in MN, and then another 2 in the airport late at night in Philly, with a bit more luggage than I could comfortably handle, after very little sleep, and with Sam jet-lagged, cranky, and needing to run around. We finally got into Boston at 2AM and were both very happy to see J. again after two weeks away! Sam burst into tears when his Daddy (Dah! Dah!) left to go get the car after meeting us at baggage claim. We were all exhausted, and Sam and I were pretty jetlagged (and also hungry) and going home to a new place in this state was less than appealing. Fortunately, J. had set up our beds, the new apartment is beautiful, and after a bite to eat and a hot shower we gratefully went to sleep.

The next day we began exploring our neighborhood, which is lovely, full of great kid parks and with some nice restaurants within easy walking distance. It’s also a short walk and even shorter bikeride to our offices.

Some pics of the new place and neighborhood soon to come, along with Sam’s burgeoning word list, in case anyone is interested what he’s saying these days.

Japan pics 1

2006-07-24T22:16:00.000-04:00

So much to catch up on! Here are some pictures of Japan; pics of the new apartment (and also a couple of older ones of Sam at his Uncle D and Aunt S's wedding in May) to come shortly.

Sam and I traveled to Japan in June with his Omi and Opa, and visited my Obaachan (grandmother) and aunt. We traveled to Sapporo to attend my brother M's wedding. Sapporo is a beautiful city, laid out in a much more Western (i.e., grid-like) fashion than most large Japanese cities and thus much easier for me, at least, to navigate. Traveling there from Obaachan's house in Chiba took a whole day, of walking to the train station near her house (in pouring rain, with lots of bags), taking two trains to Haneda airport in Tokyo, flying from Haneda to Sapporo, taking another train into the city, and then walking (in more pouring rain) from the train station in Sapporo to our hotel. We had a very nice dinner at Aunt R's father's apartment, which Sam slept through in the shinkansen (cartoon character based on the bullet train) sleeping bag that R's mom bought as a gift for Sam. The next day was clear, and we spent the morning at the Botanical Gardens enjoying not being inside a vehicle of any kind:

Sam was so pleased to be running around amongst all the green that he had to do a little dance, and a few other visitors to the garden were charmed enough to take pics:

That afternoon, Opa went to get his sister (my Tante G.) and her husband (my Onkel S.) from the airport, Omi practiced violin for her performance at the reception, and Sam and I took a walk through Omori park, which runs through the middle of Sapporo. There were a couple of really cool play sculptures designed by the famous Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi-- aesthetically pleasing, large-scale slides, essentially. Sam and I shared an ear of roasted corn (a lot of corn is grown on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, where Sapporo is located, and vendors roasting ears of it line the park). Sam ran around the broad walkways, pausing to munch on corn, smiling at everyone he passed. Here he is looking serious (J. thinks this looks like an album cover):

The following day was the wedding, in a Shinto shrine on the grounds of a park where Aunt R. spent a lot of time walking her dogs while she was growing up. The shrine was beautiful, and the ceremony was a lovely pageant. Here's a picture of Aunt R entering the shrine in her spectacular wedding kimono, flanked by her mom and by Uncle M.

Sam fell asleep in his stroller, but woke up halfway through the ceremony at the sounds of loud drums being struck, and while my Tante G. rushed him out (so I could stay), I could hear him crying in the shrine grounds outside, so I left and went out to soothe him. Not long after, the ceremony was over. We all posed for photos, then went to a fancy wedding reception site. Sam enjoyed playing in the fountain. Here he is in the pants and vest Omi made for him, and the red bowtie she found:

More soon to come...

Eek!

2006-06-06T23:27:00.000-04:00

Oh my goodness.. somehow it's been a month since I posted here.

And I don't even have any new pictures to share.

It's been a busy month: Sam's Uncle D. and Aunt S. got married in CT. I'm hoping we get pics back soon, as we didn't take any at the actual event, and Sam danced like a wild thing from about 11PM (when I'd given up trying to put him to sleep, and let the babysitter go home) until after midnight. We figured we'd pay for it later, but he was cheerful (and punch-drunk) and having a great time. He did get a cold a couple of days later, which may or may not be related, but there are only so many times in life one gets to go to one's uncle's wedding.

That said, heh, we're headed to Sam's Uncle M. and Aunt R.'s wedding in Japan in a few days. I'm flying alone with him to MN, then the next day flying to Japan with my parents (Sam's Opa and Omi) and spending 2 weeks there visiting my grandmother, attending the wedding, and traveling a bit. When we get back, we're going directly to Boston, because J. will have moved us in the meantime. (Well, the movers will move us, strictly speaking, but J. will be coordinating all that and meeting them up there the day before we get there.)

So, as you can imagine, it's a somewhat chaotic time, what with saying goodbye to everyone and finishing up work and packing for the trip and packing up our apartment. We've also said bye to all of the semester's babysitters, 2 of whom started babysitting Sam 9 months ago in September! We have been very very lucky to have a wonderful crew of Penn students watching Sam by turns; they have all been responsible, affectionate, attentive individuals. We're going to miss them a lot... they have made going to work much easier than it might have been.

I promise to update more regularly once we settle into the new place (and to post pics of the new apartment!) Sam dancing pics hopefully also to follow...

toddlerhood

2006-05-02T22:56:00.000-04:00

Recent evidence that Sam is most definitely a toddler comes not from his toddling (though there is plenty of that). Instead, it comes from his increasingly definite opinions. We never really had the impression that Sam was lacking in opinions before now, but the past couple of weeks have seen a distinct increase in how emphatically he expresses them, and a corresponding decrease in how willing he is to be distracted from something he wants. Two examples:

Though he's been quite adept at getting off the bed or the couch by turning around and sliding down feet-first for a while now, he doesn't get many chances to practice going down stairs. So a couple of days ago, I tried to give him some chances, first inside the apartment on the three stairs going from the bathroom down to the hallway, and then outside, on the four stairs from the front door to the front yard. However, he wasn't having any of this going-down-backwards stuff; he wanted to go down standing up, facing forward, like an adult. I would tell him "feet first", and he would smile at me slightly, stand there, and dip his foot off the edge of the top step. I would pick him up, turn him around, put him down on his hands and knees, then coax his foot down to the next step-- and he would crawl forward, stand up, turn around, look right at me, and dip his foot off the edge again. For about ten minutes. So finally, I held both his hands and helped him take the huge steps down facing forward. Um-- he won't be left alone around any steps any time soon.

He also had a brief but heartfelt crying fit later that same day when I wouldn't let him play with the straw in my smoothie cup. We'd been sharing a smoothie, me offering him sips from his own little cup (to repeated demands of "moh!"), but he spied my red straw and grabbed for it. I tried offering him a drink, but he hasn't figured out how to drink from straws yet, and he just wanted to paly with it. I realized this too late, and he sprayed an arc of raspberry smoothie across himself and the stroller before I grabbed it back, stuck it back in my cup, and kept it well out of reach. When he realized he couldn't have it, he pitched a fit. At the park. With plenty of lovely distractions to look at and run to, all around him, and as much moh lovely smoothie as he wanted in his own cup. I have the feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better.

On the brighter side: his stranger anxiety is at a general low, and his separation anxiety also doesn't seem too bad (then again, when I leave him, it's always with familiar people like his babysitters)-- despite a predicted increase in both of these things around this age. So hopefully his upcoming new-babysitter experiences-- our May-only babysitter starting next week, and Aunt S. and Uncle D.'s wedding later this month-- will go smoothly.

Some new things Sam can do: use a spoon (it's a messy endeavor, and half the time the bowl of the spoon is facing down, but he keeps determinedly dipping then maneuvering to his mouth, and ate some baby food green beans all by himself-- an extra bonus, because he's been pretty uncooperative on the spoon-feeding front for a few months, so he's been getting all his veggies finger-food style); use a fork (though with a bit less success); take bites of something (specifically, a soft taco that I was holding for him); scribble with crayons; spin the salad spinner:

New words in the past couple of weeks: bear (which he has used both to refer to his teddy bear, and to request a reading of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear", one of his favorite books); bird (another stuffed animal); baby; bye (including as a command, yesterday, when he wanted our babysitter to leave so I would nurse him); "oof" for woof (when he sees a dog while we're walking, he will often announce, "Dah! oof! dah! oof!"); "moh" for more; "wah" for water.

Final note: we googled snudge to see if this blog comes up (it doesn't, at least not in the first couple of pages of links). And we found, to our surprise, that it exists already as a word. There are a couple of old definitions (e.g., "n., a thief who hides under a bed in order to rob a house"; "v., to lie snug or quiet"), neither of which really apply to Sam. There are also some modern and, shall we say, not-family-friendly ones (google them yourself, if you're curious-- hi, Grandma!), which, ahem, don't really apply to Sam either. For the record, J. made up the name, as he has most of the nicknames Sam has had since birth; it was probably from a combination of snuggly and fudgie. Sam is snuggly only occasionally, usually first thing in the morning, but he's fudgie most all the time, though he seems to be stretching out and getting taller and less chunkalicious (but not any less delicious) every day.

2006-04-25T00:29:00.000-04:00

Sam and I were playing on the floor today after I got home from work, and I'd given him a little cup of cheerios as a snack to tide him over til dinner. Having seen me help myself to a handful at the same time, Sam picked up a cheerio and fed it to me. I think that's the closest to an empathetic act he's gotten-- very sweet.

FL for Pesach

2006-04-23T23:23:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago we had a baby shower for Sam's first babysitter, who's become a friend (and is expecting her first baby next month). The friend who hosted the shower has a dog, and Sam was fascinated with her water bowl. Since the food bowl was empty, and the dog remarkably well-trained and tolerant, Sam was allowed to play in the water bowl while we cleaned up after brunch:

He spent a good half hour enthralled, scooping water out of the water bowl with a tupperware lid and dumping it into the food bowl.

A couple of days after the shower we went to visit Sam's paternal grandparents in Florida. Sam experienced his first Passover seder, though he didn't quite manage the 4 questions, and went to sleep before it was time to look for the afikomen. He was a big fan of matzoh balls, though. He also enjoyed daily swims in Grandma and Grandpa's pool, especially playing with the waterfall from the hot tub into the pool:

We went to the beach on our last morning in Florida and 'swam' a bit there. The water was warm and the waves barely lapped at the shore, and unlike his previous beach trip-- to Delaware last September-- he wasn't a bit scared of the water, and didn't try to eat sand at all. I'm guessing we'll be spending a lot more time at the beach in future FL visits. The only downside was that playing in the waves so exhausted him that he conked out afterwards for a good 2 hours, so wasn't the slightest bit tired for the flight home. He's slept on almost every one of the flights we've taken him on-- yes, we've been very lucky-- but this time he was wide awake, cheerful, and wanting to be mobile for all three hours of the flight. We'd brought a new book, and both of us read it at least 5 times, complete with many doggie noises. The nice lady sitting next to J. also helped entertain him. But we were still exhausted by the time we got home. This made me consider Benadryl for the upcoming flight to Japan much more seriously.

A final bit of good news: We found an apartment! It gets tons of light from all sides, has a nice little balcony and a great little shared yard with a patio and a garden. Hardwood floors throughout, in great shape, de-leaded, usable kitchen, plenty of space. It's about a fifteen minute walk to our future offices (and thus to Sam's future daycare). And there's a guest bedroom, so we're looking forward to hosting friends and family. It's funny to think that this will be the first place Sam remembers living...

one year pics

2006-04-03T22:15:00.000-04:00

Now that I've got a bit of content up here, I'm going to send out the address for this site. Hi, folks!

We finally got around to taking some official one-year-old portraits yesterday. Any votes for the most-frameable? (Note: You can click on any of these for a full-size version.)

Then we came inside and did some finger-painting. Well, I did some finger-painting. You can see what Sam did. Good thing I thought to strip him down beforehand. He still doesn't seem to get the 'intentional making of marks on paper' aspect of painting, so I think we'll wait a bit before trying it again.

Tonight we had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, with salad. Sam had meatballs, and some steamed carrots (he had had a snack of raisin bread and O's about an hour before). Sam looooooves meatballs. We lost count, but he had either 6 or 7. These aren't huge meatballs, mind you, but for comparison, that's about the number that I ate. (And I didn't have any raisin bread or O's beforehand, either.)

In other news, Sam's definitely developing a sense of humor, though his humor tends to the physical: A couple of nights ago, he lost his balance while walking and sat down. This happens about once every two or three minutes these days, but since I was paying attention at that moment, I said "boom!" and Sam thought that was funny. He stood up again, then squatted down suddenly and very intentionally, and looked at me expectantly. When I said "boom!" again, he cracked up, and spent the next five minutes sticking his bum out or squatting, each time saying "oom!" or waiting for me to do so, then giggling like he'd just made the best joke ever. He remembers it, too: Every time I've said "boom!" since then, he's smiled, done the sudden squat, and said "oom!"

Some good news to close on: We found out today that Sam got a spot at the daycare we were most hoping to get into. We have been on the waiting list for this daycare since LAST JANUARY, when J. first got his job offer. Before he accepted it, mind you: we knew this would be a tough thing, but we didn't realize just how tough. We got on two wait lists then, and several more this winter when we realized that despite the 18-or-so months lead time, we might not still make it into our first choice. Getting in isn't a matter of passing any fancy tests, like those New York City pre-schools you've been reading about; it's just that demand is so high that spots almost never free up, and when they do, siblings of kids already in the daycare are given first priority. We really liked the way this one felt when we visited, and also, it's so close to our offices that we can literally see it from our respective office windows. And also, it's a co-op, meaning that one of us (i.e., me) will spend 2 hours a week helping out there. While this is a nontrivial time commitment, we both liked the idea that we'll have a really good sense of what goes on there during the day, and that the other parents will as well. So, a big sigh of relief; we were starting to think we'd be looking for a nanny next year, though we really didn't want to have to do that for a number of reasons.

hey there, cupcake

2006-04-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

Sam had a cold on his birthday, and wasn't at all interested in the cupcake he was offered that day, or the day after. So about ten days after his birthday, we tried again. He still wasn't interested in eating it, but he had a lot of fun with it nonetheless:

one year old

2006-03-28T20:51:00.000-05:00

Is there anything sweeter than sleeping snudge? He's propped up on the boppy because he had a cold on his birthday, poor guy.

test

2006-03-28T20:45:00.000-05:00

test