Josh and Sand

We went to the Res today, a local swimming hole with a sandy beach. He was entranced. He kept digging his hands and feet into the sand then looking up at me and smiling, as if to say "Thanks Mom, this is great!" He crawled all over the place, including all the way into the water. He would have kept on going if I hadn't been stopping him. It seemed important only to me that he be able to keep breathing and keep his head above water. He did eat a handful of sand, but only once. He is a smart boy and knows yucky stuff when he tastes it. He loved to watch Samantha cavort in the water with a friend. He'd smile and smack the water with glee whenever Sam came over to say hello. He got tired from all the crawling and fresh air, so I gave him a bottle. He took an hour and a half nap in the stroller. A very long nap for him. The clouds got really thick and dark, so we left, just before the rain squall hit.

What a lovely day.

Memere's Birthday

Sam and I did go berrying on the twelfth. We picked over 20 pounds of berries. Sam picked 5 pounds on her own. I couldn't get her out of the patch. About an hour in I asked her if she wanted to stop and get some ice cream. No, she wanted to fill her basket. SHe kept picking. I say, hey, I can't feel my knees anymore, can we stop? "Nope, your basket is full Mommy but mine isn't. Can we work together as a team and fill both baskets?" Well, okay. Sheesh! Even ice cream doesn't stop her from just one more strawberry! I tease her that Me'mere would be so proud, a chip off the old strawberry. Sam starts any questions about me'mere with "how many teeth did she have when she died?" Sam can't fathom someone not going to the dentist every six months, or outliving your teeth. Life has changed. So I tell her stories that Me'mere told me about her life in 1900 onwards. Life without refrigerators, cars, and of course, dentists. We work our way down the row as I share Me'mere stories, and I think Me'mere would be very happy to be remembered that way.

Help is on the way, maybe

The pain treatment clinic called, and they have a last minute opening on Tuesday, so we're bringing Samantha in for her initial evaluation and workup. There's a 20 page questionnaire we have to fill out first, consisting half of questions for Sam and half of questions for us. I'm so glad we don't have to wait until July 31st for them to see her.

Meanwhile life continues apace. Samantha is on summer vacation from school now, while Joshua continues to get bigger and stronger every day and is now pulling himself up and standing while holding onto things on a regular basis. Amy says he's stood up unsupported a couple of times as well, but I haven't seen that yet.

Today is Father's Day. This morning I mowed the lawn then we all spent some time in the back yard. Joshua loves crawling around naked in the grass, although you have to keep an eye on him to keep him from putting dirt and rocks in his mouth. Samantha likes climbing into the hammock with me. And the dogs like to just lie in the grass and soak up the warmth, although on particularly hot days Ella is wont to dig herself a den underneath one of the trees or hedges.

I've got a bit of work to catch up on -- writing a presentation for a meeting tomorrow -- after which we're probably going to take Samantha and Joshua to the beach at the Arlington reservoir (aka "the res"). At some point I have to pay the bills this weekend too, but it would be a waste of such a nice day to spend the whole afternoon doing that.

...now I are one

Samantha is a nursery school graduate! The school had their little graduation ceremony this morning. It was all very cute. All the kids sang along with a guitar player. Video to follow once I get it off the camera and figure out how to post a link to it here. Then they all went up, one by one, and got their certificates of completion from their teachers. Sam was so excited she could have just burst.

I don't think she quite understands what it means to have the summer off, nor that kindergarten in the fall is going to be 6 hours a day 5 days a week instead of 3 hours a day 3 days a week. It's sad that she won't be going to the same school as Oliver and Liam anymore. We'll have to make extra efforts to be sure they continue to see each other.

Knee

Her knee still hurts, but she is managing it well. We have been able to spread out her medication with better results.

Sam announces with a definite air that "I am never letting anyone else's slime in my mouth." I say, yup, sounds good to me. She is at an age where germs are a big deal. Of course living with the slime monster probably makes her more conscious. Joshua has been teething for months now and that involves lots of slime.

We are off to go strawberrying this morning at Tougas Farm
http://www.tougasfarm.com/
Looks like a nice place.

Even more new pictures

There's no real reason for this post except that I liked some of these pictures from our weekend in New Hampshire. Samantha is obviously fond of her cousin here:

And sometimes she's downright devoted to her cousin Abbie:

And at other times she's just a five year old goofball who wanted to take a goofy picture for her friend Liam. This one's for you, Liam:

Uhm, yeah, it's just like that

We went to New Hampshire this past weekend for Amy's nephew's high school graduation. More about that trip in another post, maybe. Samantha got to see her cousins, of whom she is very fond. She also got bitten on the forehead by something in her bed at our hotel during the night, poor kid, and her forehead and face swelled up something awful. Her eyes were so puffy and swollen she could barely open one of them. She's been on Benadryl and Claritin for the past three days, and we actually ended up taking her to the emergency room on the way home from NH just to make sure it was nothing more serious than an allergic reaction. She's on the mend now, fortunately.

That's not the topic of this post.

The topic of this post is words: Samantha's remarkable vocabulary and how unintentionally hilarious some of her comments are. We were driving along and had the following conversation.

Sam: How long until we get to aunt Pat's house?
Amy: About 10 or 15 minutes.
Sam: What does "about" mean?
Matt: What do you think it means?
Sam: Maybe a little bit less, maybe a little more?
Matt: That's right, that's exactly what it means.
Sam (excitedly): Oh! So it's like "approximately"!

Yeah, that's right ... the definition of "about" is "approximately". That's my daughter...

New words she's picked up this week include circumnavigate, resplendent, recite, and solitary. If you have children and don't own a copy of "Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant", shame on you.

An eye for detail

I was reminded again the other day what a phenomenal eye for detail Samantha has. I just ordered a new pair of running shoes online because I want one pair to keep at work for use in our building's gym and one pair to keep in my car for use at the Y. I can't actually run anymore, but good running shoes provide the right level of support for the things I can do. But I digress...

Because there's one brand and model that's particularly good for my peculiar biomechanical issues (Brooks Addiction, if you must know) I always order exactly the same thing. So I get home from work one day last week and there's a package for me, and since Samantha really wants me to open it right away, I do. I take out the shoes and she looks at them for maybe three seconds and then says "They're different from your other shoes, dada." I don't think so, since they're the same brand and model, but she insists that they are. Now these shoes follow the current fad in running shoes, which means they're about 27 different colors -- shades of gray and white and silver and a few other accent colors. Samantha points to most of the colors and says "No, dad, you other ones are this color and this color and this color and this color and this color." I assure her again that these new shoes are identical in every way to my old shoes, and she tells me again that they're not.

The next morning I'm carrying the new shoes downstairs to put in my car and also packing my gym bag with the old ones, and I notice something interesting. Damned if Samanatha wasn't right. Sometime in the 3 or 4 months since I ordered my last pair of running shoes, they changed the color scheme. To be more precise, they changed one tiny insignificant detail of the color scheme. The little rubberized plastic logo on the side of the shoe, which is maybe an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, changed from dark gray with a yellow border to solid yellow. That's it -- that's the only change. And Samantha noticed it within about two seconds of seeing these new shoes.

She's done things like this before. One of her favorite stories used to be "The Sneetches" by Dr. Suess. There's a picture in the book that's just a sea of Sneetches covering two full pages. Sneetches, as you'll know if you've read the book, are divided into star-bellied Sneetches and plain-bellied Sneetches, and the stars on the star-bellied Sneetches are all green.

Except for one of them. In the middle of this sea of Sneetches, there's one with a star that isn't colored in. I don't know if it's a misprint or intentional, but there's one of these dozens of creatures that's ever so subtlety different from the others. Guess how long it took Samantha to notice this?

When she was even younger -- around two -- she liked to watch the animated HBO series based on "Harold and the Purple Crayon". (If you have kids between two and five I highly recommend it.) In one of the episodes we see Harold's goldfish bowl. In one scene there's a jar of fish food next to the bowl. In the next scene it's gone, and in the scene after that it's back. Want to know how I know this? Sam, of course.

Continuity-R-Us, I guess.