Sometimes Samantha just absolutely cracks me up. I came home from work earlier tonight and found her in the basement where Amy was sewing. Sam was standing in the doorway between the two halves of the basement with a box of styrofoam packing peanuts next to her, and a small mountain of peanut pieces -- halves, actually -- piled up in front of her.

She took a peanut out of the box, broke it in half, held one half in each hand then raised her hands up toward her chest (the hand gesture for "sit" when training a dog) while saying "Sit! Good sit!", then throwing the peanut halves on the floor. Breaking dog treats in half and holding one half in each hand like this is exactly what we do when we're telling both Ella and Tucker to sit at the same time. Then into the box for another packing peanut, break it in half, "Sit! Good sit!", throw the halves on the floor. Then another, and another, and another. Amy said she'd been doing that for some time, and from the size of the pile in front of her I believed it.

I asked Samantha what she was doing and she told me she was "feeding the sharks, because they are very very hungry." She talks about sharks a lot after our last trip to the aquarium where she saw a couple of them swimming in the big tank. Not as often as the talks about "my friend the lionfish", but often enough. I asked if sharks ate styrofoam packing peanuts and she told me, quite indignantly, that she was feeding them noodles. Not only was she feeding the pretend sharks pretend noodles, she was teaching them to sit. It was a riot.

Thinking of things she does that are a riot, I realized I never posted about her friend the pumpkin.

A couple of weeks before Halloween we bought a couple of big pumpkins for carving and a small sugar pumpkin that Samantha wanted. We explained that we would make jack-o-lanterns from the big ones and that the small ones were for cooking to make pumpkin pie or pumpkin cookies. (Helpful hint: If you're going to carve a jack-o-lantern using power tools, do it OUTSIDE. I'm still cleaning pumpkin guts out of the corners of the kitchen ceiling.)

Samantha carried that sugar pumpkin around for two weeks. She talked to it and slept with it and told it stories. She called it "my friend the pumpkin". She washed it with a wet washcloth when she thought it needed a bath, and wrapped it in a blanket when it got cold. She really took impressively good care of it, in fact.

Then one day she carried it over to Amy, held it up in both hands, and said "Cook it!". Yeah, you heard that right. After two weeks of tender loving care, she decided -- insisted, really -- that it was time for mommy to cook her friend the pumpkin "so I can eat him." I found it hilarious, in a vaguely disturbing Jeffrey Dahmer sort of way.