Sam and Daddy are off trick or treating. Sam is dressed as a cow and seems to have fun going “moo, moo” now and then. She is just cute as a button. She is “pretty cow” because she has oiled hoofs (patent leather shoes) and lacy fetlocks (lace trimmed socks). The ensemble is completed with a dab of black face paint on her nose and her cheek. We went to the parade on Magnolia street, and there were some very creative costumes there. Sam had to go in the stroller. She was too tired to walk far.

Sam’s language is just amazing. She is using possessives, and extrapolating words from one situation to the next with ease. There is a monkey in the little train that could that is walking on all paws. She pointed to his hands and toes and named each one, then raised her toes and pointed to her own toes.

Walking through the woods today. It is 50 degrees, with the sun shining very brightly and a nice crisp feel to the air. Ella takes off up the hill; a less traveled one that is covered with pine needles. We trek off after her, since this is one of my favorite paths but I don't take it often because it is pretty wild, and not many other dogs on it for Ella to play with. Sam stops now and then to shake the trees, investigate a stick, toss a mushroom. She laughs with abandon at Ella whenever Ella scrapes the ground with her hind legs. Ella is showing great disdain for some scent, must be a fox or something. As I hold Sam's hand, I think about what it has taken to get me here. The walks I took with her in me, the walks I took after being on bed rest for months. I never imagined being able to walk under this canopy with her little hand in mine, her wide-open mind soaking up the world. I turn to her and say, I really like doing this with you, sweetie, you are fun! But my voice sounds a little false, too much emotion in it. Some moments are very precious. She keeps yelling, Ella, Come, and now Ella does because she knows Sam will hand her a treat. Sam loves to give Ella treats.

I got home today and Samantha was trying to get Amy to read her the picture book about Jewish holidays for what must have been the tenth time. Amy told her to bring it to me.

We started reading it and when we got to the page about Chanukkah Samantha pointed to the plate of potato pancakes and said "Latkes!".

So now I guess she's bilingual.

Oh yeah, and "sticker". Mustn't forget "sticker", now that she's discovered them. She's very generous with them, trying to put them on the dogs, on her books, and on her daddy.

Kids put words and ideas together in the strangest ways sometimes. I asked Samantha this morning if she wanted to go way up high, and when she said yes I lifted her high enough that she could touch the ceiling. She thought this was the best things, of course. She decided this was called "balloon high", and for the rest of the day it was "Again, balloon high!"

She's eating more than two bites at a time for the first time in days. I think she does better when we're all eating together, and she's also started expressing clear preferences for foods. This morning I asked if she wanted cereal or waffles for breakfast and her unequivocal answer was "waffle" -- sure enough she ate a whole waffle, plus some fruit and orange juice. Later on at lunchtime I started rummaging through the cabinets to find something for us, and she grabbed a can of what she forcefully told me were "green beans!". She then let me know that she preferred spaghetti with sauce to macaroni and cheese today, and that she wanted the tri-colored wagon wheel shaped pasta instead of regular thin spaghetti, and she got positively giddy when I took some mushrooms out of the fridge to make sauce. Sure enough, she downed practically everything on her plate at lunch time.

Right now she's running around like a manic mad thing, which means she's overtired and needs to go to bed. She's racing around the floor looking for people and things to hug, for her Lala doll (curse those Teletubbies) and her "Ella", the stuffed boxer doll.

Hopefully she'll sleep through the night tonight -- last night she woke up at 4 am. I thought at first it was a nightmare because she was very concerned about seeing me and Amy and the dogs, but this morning when I got her dressed I found a pacifier strap with a metal alligator clip on one end inside her pajamas, and now I wonder if it just wasn't digging into her leg during the night. These are the things you don't think of at 4am when you're recovering from a concussion.

More new words today: snuggle, cuddle, macaroni.

Samantha has just brought me a copy of The Cat In The Hat and said "read!", so it's time to end this entry. House rules -- we drop whatever we're doing when our daughter wants to read a book.

Samantha has evidently decided that Ella is a pony. She tries to throw one leg over her back and says "Ride Ella" while she does it. If Ella is lying down on the floor Sam will straddler her back and sit on her. Ella, for her part, exhibits extraordinary patience -- usually she just looks back over her shoulder and licks Samantha's face.

She's started saying "Please" but only intermittently, as in "Lap please" when she wants to climb into your lap. Lap is another new word, as are snuggle, tea, and coffee. Somehow she's figured out that cups from the local bakery (Carberry's) contain coffee, and that the big thermal serving carafe is for "hot coffee". How she figured that one out I'll never know.

Samantha completely cracked my up the other day. She'd dropped her pacifier on the floor someplace and decided a little while longer that she wanted it. She looked me and Amy and said "Gabba! Gabba!". Amy reminded her that she'd dropped it on the floor, and she toddled off from room to room looking for it. When she spotted it on the floor of our bedroom she exclaimed with glee "Ah! Gabba!" Then she picked it up, looked at it for a minute, and said "Hi, Gabba!" before sticking it into her mouth. I wish I'd had the video camera at the time -- it was just priceless.

It's also pretty adorable when she looks up into the sky as airplanes fly overhead and says "Hug plane!", and then "Bye bye plane" as the sound of the airplane fades off into the distance.

Her main verbs: eat, come, read. She says "come" in this imperious voice and then claps her hands. The dogs still ignore her. Today she tried that on Hamlet, and of course he ignored her. She has that smooching sound now that I use to bring in the cats. She stand at the door and yells "Kitty" and smooches with me to bring them in. Cracks me up. She helps with the laundry too. I'll hand her clothes and she puts them in the washer. She also takes the clean clothes and puts them in the washer again, but I can fix that easily enough. I still tell her what a good job she is doing and how strong she is to be able to help mommy so well. She thinks it is fun. I'm going to remember this when she is a teenager.

Playground Bullies

I’ve had my first encounter with them on Sam’s behalf, and it is frustrating. When you’re a kid, you can haul off and smack them, but it's not at all okay for adults. I used my dog voice to tell the little boy not to kick Sam, and he stopped in mid air. Then he started laughing and wandered off. He went on to really whack another child before his mother thought maybe he should go home. This was a 4-5 year old, which I thought would know better.

Today, Samantha approached two girls in the tunnel at the playground and gave them her megawatt smile. One of the little girls looked at Sam and screamed “Go away, I hate you!” I took Sam’s hand and told her that girl was mean and we didn’t want to play with mean, nasty girls. We went down the slide instead. It didn’t faze Samantha one bit. I, however, noticed that the little snit scowled at us and everyone else, and I started to feel sorry for the horrible child.

Sam sat on a tire swing with two five-year-old boys who couldn’t have been sweeter. He thought it was funny that she was a girl but her name was for a boy. He kept asking if he was being careful enough with her, then he told me he was very good at taking care of babies, that he had a two-year-old brother at home. His name was Corey and I hope he stays as sweet as he is now. It’s funny, so far I have to say the boys are much nicer kids and the girls are really bossy. I hope Sam stays sweet.

It must be fall in New England, because the Red Sox are on the verge of losing the ALCS to the Yankees again. (Obligatory optimistic note: It's not really over yet. They can still take the series if they win both of the remaining games, and there are certainly a lot of people who'd love to see a Sox/Cubs world series.)

It's also the first really rainy, blustery day. The trees have started to turn, many of them an ugly mustardy yellow or muted brown. But every once in a while there's a brilliant orange or crimson tree visible from the hill near our house. Autumn is definitely arriving.

Samantha's lexicon increases faster than I can even keep track. One of the child development books we read says that at peak language acquisition time toddlers learn one new word per hour every waking hour of their day.

I think Samantha must be coming up on that point fast. Latest additions over the past few days include "read!!!!!", "read book", "daddy read please" -- can you tell she loves books? -- "sock off please" (said to her sock as she was trying unsuccessfully to pull it off her foot!), "broken" (a word she heard exactly once this morning and immediately applied to a pacifier with the end cut off), "food", "drink", "lunch", "yup!", "fishie" (we have to take her to the aquarium soon) and "peanut butter" (when she wanted some peanut butter on a graham cracker). She also now distinguishes between her crib and her bed and uses the appropriate word for each of them.

Watching children acquire language is just the most amazing thing. I thought seeing her learn to walk and climb was astounding, but it's nothing compared to this. I can't even begin to imagine what's going on in her head as she's learning all this new vocabulary.

New developments: We're moving to the era of two and three word sentences now. Samantha noticed a new scar on my arm (burned it on the heating system last week) and said "Daddy boo boo", for example.

As expected, Samantha rolled out of her crib in the night once or twice the day I took the side rail off. At least we thought at the time that she might have rolled out -- she was on the floor crying her head off when we went in to the room. Well, not the floor -- we had pillows piled up two deep all along the crib. Now I wonder if she didn't just climb out because she was looking for her pacifier and throw a tantrum when she couldn't find it.

Anyway, we felt certain at the time that she'd rolled out and would hurt herself, so we rigged up a long bolster pillow the length of the crib along the side to keep her in. It was low enough for her to climb over but high enough that she wouldn't roll over it at night and tied to the crib on both ends. That worked pretty well for the first couple of nights, until one of the ties tore off and it came loose.

Finally we decided yesterday to take the plunge and move her out of the crib and into a toddler bed. So we went out and bought one and I assembled it last night and started disassembling the crib so we could move it out. I'm sure we're going about this all wrong, and that we're supposed to leave both beds in the room for a week and make a slow transition from one to the other, but instead we're trying it cold turkey and hoping that she won't be too traumatized by the switch from a crib to her bed. I think that once she gets used to it she'll be fine, but if there's really a problem we can get an inexpensive second crib mattress and give her the choice of which one to sleep in for a while.

Traumatic Experiences In Parenthood
(episode 23 in a seemingly endless series)

Amy told me today that Samantha had climbed over the crib rail in and out of her crib five times while the rail was down, and was trying to climb over it even when the rail was up. Tonight I watched her as she climbed over the (down) rail, tossed all her stuffed toys out of the crib onto the floor, then climbed back out of the crib to hug them all.

She was balancing precariously enough on the railing during the trip that I promptly hauled out my toolbox and removed the rail. That's right, as of tonight Samantha is sleeping in a toddler bed instead of a crib.

I'm sure we'll have to put some soft blankets and things on the floor next to it for the first few weeks just in case she rolls right out of the crib in the night, but my little girl is officially past the crib stage. I can see school and then dating lurking just around the corner ...

Last night's new phrase was "stop it". I'm not entirely convinced she knows what it means yet, since she said it in two completely different and opposite situations:

• Ella came over and started licking Samantha's face, at which point she said "Ella stop it".
  
  
• I was putting her shoes on her so she could go over and see her friend Cole for an hour while Amy and I went to an open house for Arlington pre-schools. Although she likes Cole and Cole's mother Becky and was eager to go (me: "Samantha, do you want to go see Becky and Cole for a while?" samantha: "Yeah! Becky!!!!") she still kept repeating "stop it" as I put her shoes on. Who knows? Maybe she just wanted to go barefoot.
  

Last night was a rough one. For some reason she woke up repeatedly during the night, screaming hysterically for her pacifier, and unwilling to be consoled until Amy came in and held her. This happened at 1am, at 2am, and again at 3:30am and she was up for at least 1/2 hour each time. We finally got to sleep at around 4am, and then at 5:15am Ella woke up and threw up on the floor. Dogs... Some days you just can't get a break.

Samantha is becoming aware of colors and numbers. With a little prodding she can tell you whether an object is red or blue, and she's fascinated with the number two. I'm not sure she really gets other numbers yet, but she's definitely got "two" down. She'll hold out two fingers and shout "two!", or show you her shoes and say "two shoes." Her latest thing is to take a pacifier (which she calls a "gabba" -- don't ask why) in each hand and proclaim "two gabbas!" before gleefully stuffing them both in her mouth at the same time.

I wonder if it's normal for kids to start learning these things as early as 20 months, or if she's unusual. She certainly amazes me.

Sam loves her dogs. She gives them both hugs all the time, and not infrequent kisses, and this morning she was sitting on top of Ella like a pony. Ella, for her part, bore her rider with great patience.

She's still picking up random objects and handing them to you, saying "here you go" each time. And she finds the phrase "no thank you" simply hilarious when you decline to accept her half-chewed up food or the tidbits she offers from her high chair tray. A simple "no thank you, Samantha" is likely to be met with paroxysms of laughter.

Today's new phrases include "witch hat", in reference to a little tiny witch's hat that Amy bought for purposes of humiliating the dogs but which Samantha likes to pick up and put on her own head, and "spigot" for the sprinkler heads on the neighbor's lawn that we pass on our morning walks. Now honestly, how many 2 year olds do you know who say "spigot"?

Oh, and before I forget, we're also got "cookie", "Tucker", "some" (meaning "give me some of what you're eating, please"), "hand" (which means "please hold my hand while we walk"), "bed" (as in "I want to jump on the bed now") and "go walk". Her vocabulary is probably between 75 and 100 words now, and she can understand considerably more than that. Simply amazing ...

The new words are coming fast and furious. Yesterday Samantha asked for dog treats and then offered them to each of the dogs, saying "here you go" each time she gave one of them a treat. This morning she discovered pockets on our morning walk with the dogs, picking up every acorn and small rock she could and sticking them into her pockets.

She also said acorn and pocket for the first time, and somehow she's figured out that there's water running below the manhole covers in the street. She stops at each one, points down, and says "water!"

She's progressed from walking to running, where both feet are off the ground at the same time. Still a little unsteady in the way all toddlers are, but she's getting better at it every day. It's also very cute the way she walks down the street holding one hand out to Amy and the other hand out to me, and saying "hand" until we each take of her hands so she can walk between us. She's a very outdoor kind of girl -- she loves the park and the playground. I'm curious how she'll do in the snow this winter; I have a feeling she'll just love sledding down the hillside at the Sheepfold with Ella and Tucker bounding along beside her.

Her favorite thing this week seems to be bouncing and jumping on our bed. She insisted ("bed! bed! bed!") on doing this for almost 20 minutes last night before going off to sleep in her own crib. She's also very fond of the little doll Amy got her last week. When did my daughter start turning into a girl?