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.