We lost Sam at the Magic Kingdom. It lasted all of five minutes, but it was a frantic five minutes, I can assure you. Anybody with small children knows how fast they can vanish. I remember in my teens watching a dear friend’s toddler at the county fair for a few minutes. I was holding Tessa’s hand one second, and then the next, she was gone. Like that. And even though I found her barely half a minute later, she was already yards away from me, investigating the elephant ear stand. It scared me then, and she wasn’t even my personal baby.… Read the rest
Tag Archives: Sam
I’ve always been a Gulf coast kind of girl. As in the Gulf of Mexico. I cannot imagine a retirement that doesn’t have Naples, Florida in it. In fact, to my knowledge, in spite of spending a large portion of my childhood in South Florida, I had never been to the Atlantic coast until we went there last week during our Orlando visit. Mom hates the Atlantic. Well, not really. It’s all relative, and any ocean is better than none for her. But she has always said the Atlantic is cold and the shells aren’t very good. She is right on both counts.… Read the rest
I have a confession to make. I know I said I hadn’t been blogging because I was swimming with Sam, and I know I claimed to have been grading like crazy. And those things are true. But the primary reason I haven’t been online for the last several days is that we were on vacation in Orlando. Yes, that’s right, we did Disney for Sam’s birthday. And then I’ve spent a week getting caught back up with the paying job, because, well, Scott and I aren’t wealthy enough for me to contemplate the alternative.
We had an awesome time with friends Dennis and Kristi and their kiddos.… Read the rest
Sorry there wasn’t a blog entry yesterday. I’ve been swimming with Sam. I know I blogged a couple of days ago that he was almost swimming. Since then, I swear I’ve spent at least twelve of the last twenty four hours in the water with that kid. OK, not true. But it was at least six. He is totally swimming. Not just “almost there”, but really there, totally there, and completely comfortable with himself in the pool.
He orders me to stand further and further back as he leaps from the edge, bobbing easily to the surface with his face still submerged.… Read the rest
Sam is learning to swim, and he’s almost there. Well, I say almost, when really, the kid’s there. He’s there. The teacher can let go of him for several strokes and he’ll stay afloat. He doesn’t shy away in terror any longer from her classes, like he did just a few weeks ago, and he even gets excited about jumping in the water and chasing down the toys she throws for him. His skills have increased dramatically since he started, and his attitude has become correspondingly positive. He differs from me there. Both my kids do. My attitude is hard to modify, and I struggle to give something I dislike a “second chance”, even if I continue doing it.… Read the rest
This morning, Scott went out to put the lid on the sandbox and came back in with three signs from the tree house.
These stem from a combination of Caroline’s current Calvin and Hobbes addiction and a recent playdate at our house. Caroline’s been reading the series where Calvin makes a boys only club to keep out Susie. But that’s not Caroline’s handwriting on the signs. So we know she had help with the implementation here. Our friend Heather has two daughters and a son, and they came over the other evening. This brought a sufficient number of boys and girls together to launch an all out gender war.… Read the rest
“I eawned my tweasuwe chest!”
This is how Sam wakes us up nearly every morning. It’s a huge improvement over “I SEE THE SUN. IT IS MOWNING TIME!” Although he was eighteen months old before he got there, once Sam started sleeping through the night, he was pretty good about it. For a year. Then, he discovered that his big boy bed was not the same kind of prison as his crib, that he could, in fact, bounce up and come find me at will. All. Night. Long. We tried several methods of stopping this, from the gentle “stand-at-the-door-and-wordlessly-return-him-to-bed” (he once jumped back up a hundred times, thought the whole thing was a game, and completely wore us down) to the slightly less polite lock-the-door-from-our-side (he just screamed –once for an hour), to the completely draconian unplugging-his-nightlight-routine (that one worked, but had to repeat it every single night, and we hated it.)… Read the rest
Sam is the kind of child for whom clichés like “look before you leap” mean exactly nothing. He is very much a leap-then-look kind of boy. I’ve got some ideas about where this tendency came from. Scott and I were both pretty cautious kids. But my Dad has these reel-to-reel tapes, extremely early home videos, that show him wearing a sheet for a cape while he leaps off of a picnic table. There’s no sound on this footage, but I’m pretty sure the boy in those pictures is yelling “Superman!”. Which is just one of the things Sam likes to shout before he pitches himself forward into the unknown.… Read the rest