Wednesday, March 29, 2006


Yikes. She looks so grown-up all of a sudden in this one. Freaks me out. Posted by Picasa

Sami's puppy, Jasmine at about 5 months--Sami can't say Jasmine, so we all now call her Jazzy. Posted by Picasa

Monday, March 27, 2006

Almost 19 Months

Sami will be 19 months old in two days. Wow.

She currently is just this little, dear person to be around. Her dad and I regularly marvel at how easy she is to be with, now. The unpredictability of infanthood is all but gone. Now that’s not to say the emotional ups and downs of toddlerhood aren’t present, but she’s pretty evenly tempered and has a generally sunny disposition. But we’re in the process of renovating a house, renting out a condo, etc, now, and it requires dragging her along for long boring afternoons at un-kid-friendly locales, while Mom and Dad work on things. And she’s just so… accommodating. She’s perfectly happy and entertained just to watch us at work. She’s always just so interested in the goings-on around her. She’s a born observer, and has been ever since she could sit up on her own.

That said, it also happens to be one of my favorite indulgences to find time to sit and observe her. Often, she’ll get absorbed in whatever has her interest at the moment, and loses awareness of me watching—that’s my favorite. Kids this age are so much brighter than I anticipated. She really amazes me. One day she can’t “get” the whole shape-sorting toy thing, and the next day—poof—she never misses.

Some of her quirkier traits (and forgive me if these are common to all 19 month olds—I’ve no comparisons so everything amazes and amuses me) are:
  • An obsession with peeling stickers off of items. Like, we shop for toys at secondhand stores, and her best thing is peeling the price stickers—and I mean every last teeny bit of them—off each item when we get home. Of course, sometimes she gets them peeled off before we get to check out at the store, and it is kind of embarrassing to have to endure a price-check delay at freakin’ Goodwill.
  • Our house now generally looks like a tornado has recently left things in total disarray within—toys are everywhere (you can’t pick them up while she’s awake; I generally do a pick-up every night after she goes to bed, but it is pretty pointless); but that doesn’t lessen her meticulousness at picking up every little scrap of paper she can find, and purposefully bringing it to me wherever I am in the house for proper disposal. And I’ll just say, there are lots of little scraps of paper at my house since I have a paper-saver as a husband, and a 5 month old puppy that will shred anything she can get her teeth on.
  • I sing. I'll just admit it. And I was singing me-me-me scales the other day, and now Sami--right in the middle of doing other things--will get a little sly smile, and go, "Me-me-me-me," and then wait expectantly for me to join her.
  • I've been teaching her her "parts." Like, you know, "Where're your feet?" "Where's your belly?" Where's your hands?" Where are your eyes?" etc. And I know it is probably irresponsible on my part, but instead of teaching her where her head is, I've always called it her melon. As in, "Watch where you're going, or you'll clunk yer melon!" And so she triumphantly pats her little head when I go, "Where's your melon!" And it never, ever fails to amuse me.

And now for something I’ve learned, at my old age:
  • While I’ve always had a mental concept of myself as being very laid back, nonjudgmental, and understanding of others, it kind of seems to have turned out that once Sami came into our lives, weirdly my husband arrived at a different conclusion that I might be (gasp) a control freak. And after enough Dr. Phils, it dawned on me that in certain (and I’ll just say very few) circumstances, perhaps my efforts at showing others the right way to do things could conceivably be perceived as being controlling. I like to think I’m enlightening others (particularly my husband) on how to correctly and efficiently do things for what are obvious reasons; maybe—I realized—lightening up on some of those issues might serve us all well as a family. Like, for instance, when Sami’s bathtime is over, it was so important to me that all of her myriad bath toys be emptied of water, and stacked up neatly onto the tub edges. And not just any edges, the back corner edges were the only ones that made sense, onaccounta that way during the day, the baby and the puppy can’t reach them and (another gasp here) toss them wantonly into the tub when they’re running around playing while I’m working. Then, a couple of nights in a row, I threw caution to the wind and just left the toys in the bottom of the tub (!). Hmmm. Turns out that’s lots quicker, and nothing bad seemed to stem from the practice. Go figure. I’ll let you know if any of my other theories get disproved; however unlikely.

Sami is picking up words constantly now. Today, her dad was encouraging her to put toys in the shape-sorter, and when she picked the first one up, he goes, “One…”, and she grabbed another and went “Two…” Our mouths dropped open when we looked at each other – because, um, we haven’t taught her how to count yet. Haven’t even tried. Coincidence? Probably. But it was still funny.

She can say, “bubble” as clear as day, and it applies to both the little plastic jars of bubble potion that we play with, with her and the puppy, and to a glass “snow dome” music box I have, that I never called a bubble, but of course with the round clear glass, looks just like a bubble, and so she thought up on her own to name it that. Bottle, juice, cheese, Jazzie (the pup), Kay-ee (Katie the cat), have all been added to her repertoire of Dah-ee, peace?, duh (for down or done), and “dee” for either tv or dvd—not sure. But it means she wants to watch her Baby Einstein tape or dvd. She can also say, “cwazy” at appropriate times to describe the dog, her mother, or whatnot. She popped off with an “Oh, geez,” this morning after her daddy said it. And just yesterday, every time she handed me something, she said something that sounded eerily like, “There-ya-go.”

If Michael and I don’t reign in this unmitigated adoration we have for her, we’re going to be in very big trouble pretty soon. We’re going to toughen up – I just know we will.