new photos at last!

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

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!

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: