Recently in Samantha Stuff Category

In the last couple of months, we've found that Samantha's emotions aren't that of a really young kid. Oh, she just passed her third birthday, so we do get "three year old"-itis, but in general, she seems much more mature than her age is.

She certainly doesn't like it when Mommy or Daddy have any sort of raised voice. If that happens, or one of us sounds sad for any reason, she'll usually go "What's wrong, Mommy?" or "Are you OK, Daddy?" One of her other favorites is to say "Can you make a happy face?" When you're not in a good mood, that one is hard to deal with, because you want to make her happy, and you know that she realizes you're not happy. She's quite observant of our feelings and moods.

One thing she has done since she was rather young was that whenever she heard some sort of siren, or saw emergency vehicle flashing lights when in the truck, she'd say "God Bless Them". She's grown a lot in her usage of religious things, and it's quite glorious to me as her father. For ages, we've been saying the Lord's Prayer when she goes to bed. Well, in Church after she comes in for a blessing during communion she stays afterwards. When Communion is done, everyone says the Lord's Prayer, and the light bulb went on for her, and she has started saying it with everyone else. Being three, she says it in that loud monotone kid voice, but darnit, it's cute! What else is cute about that is she's started blessing herself at the end of it. We've noticed that she has started closing her eyes when we say prayers for her (or our clergy at church doing it for her during blessings). All this has come from her. She also chastised me a week or so ago at dinnertime.. "Daddy, you didn't bless the food!", so we had to go back and say Grace.

The best thing for me that I observed recently was this past Saturday. There's a playground about two miles from our house - it's quite nice, actually, very new and clean. Anyway, Samantha and I went there while Mommy was at work, and at one point we had both climbed up one of the playground things (I can't think of a good word for them) and were sitting there playing a new game we had invented. We had been there for awhile, and I was so overwhelmed with joy that I just burst into praising God for the blessing of the day, my daughter, the love in our life, etc... Anyway, when I was done, Samantha followed me in praising by saying "Thank you God for all of my gifts". It almost made me cry.

Speaking of crying, Lynn told me a doozie when she and Samantha came home from church Sunday (I did not attend, as I was lying on my back in a lot of pain from having fallen in the house earlier this week). Lynn told me that Samantha got upset because she "couldn't hug God". Lynn got around that by saying that by hugging other people, you show God's love, and are therefore hugging God (or something like that, I'm unclear on her exact words). Samantha then said "God is in my heart", and I did cry. Maybe not bawling tears down the face crying, but wow - I was bowled over by that.

You know when we were pregnant, Samantha got us to go back to church - neither Lynn nor I were attending at that point. We hooked up with a church family that has meant so much to us, I can't even begin to describe it. The entire church has been seriously supportive to us, and that's important, what with all our "real family" back home in Pennsylvania. God led us to this church family, and has richly blessed us with the people in it. It's for that reason that something one of the clergy said to me recently has touched my heart. I was told "God is raising a strong Christian household in your house". To hear that from people whose opinions and thoughts mean a lot to me in my spiritual walk was quite humbling - Praise be to God for all those at our church in whatever capacity they are there.

Anyway, I never stop being amazed at the spiritual growth in all three of us. But this article is about Samantha, so I'll close up by saying that seeing Samantha do all these things at Church fills me with a deeper love for her than I had merely as her Earthly father.

God Bless Samantha!

Mommy is the one with the better memory, so I'm hoping to get a blog entry from her regarding other things I can't recall. :)

Those who know me know I'm into toys - I have a ton of them at my office. Those who know me know I also am into Doctor Who. It's probably my all time favorite TV show. In 2007, I've picked up a bunch of Doctor Who toys that are in my office. I've posted pictures of them before (link).

Samantha refers to these things as "Daddy's toys". She loves it when I bring them home, and this past weekend, I brought home the large Tardis from the picture above, as well as the action figures for The Doctor, Martha, & Rose Tyler. Samantha was all excited about that.

On Sunday afternoon, Lynn was out shopping, so Daddy decided to kill some time with Samantha and letting her play with "Daddy's toys". So I broke out the Tardis, and Samantha played with it and the figures for about an hour. She'd have the various figures dance, and she'd sing the Blue Danube Waltz song while making them dance in the air. She'd then have me turn the Tardis on and off and she'd laugh at the sounds it would make.

One of my favorites from this play session was when she put the figures for Rose & Martha inside the Tardis, and then closed the doors. She then had the Doctor stand at the Tardis door, and went "Uh-oh! The Doctor is sad because he can't get to his friends - the doors are locked!". So Daddy had to unlock the doors, and then she went "Yay! They're all happy now!"

It was quite cool - partially as I'm a Doctor Who fan to see her playing with the toys, but also to see her graduate to a developmental standpoint where she can interact with her toys, and give them emotions and stories that were made up from her own mind. Was a great "Daddy" moment because I got to watch it all. Yeah, the lazy guy in me thought it was cool that I got to sit there for an hour and watch her play with toys, but the more important part was the interactive play.

My daughter continues to be utterly amazing to me.

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a~z //?.;L.sd7:56 PM 11/11/2007

You ever have one of those days when it's your day to watch your kid? That's great, I love my daughter, and love spending time with her, but it's one of those days where I wish she was old enough to take care of herself, so I can go back to sleep and take a 6 hour nap. :)

Time to go play blocks after getting ANOTHER cup of coffee. ;)

UPDATE: After that, Samantha came to me and was totally overjoyed at just playing with balloons - bouncing them around the living room. It was quite energizing to have your little girl get all jazzed up at merely playing with a balloon. God works in all things, and he answered my indirect prayer with the joyous nature of my little girl. Made me smile.

This is an interesting post. As a sci-fi fan, I'm excited about it, but I'm more excited about my daughter reading. So here goes an odd one.

As I posted about back in May of 2006, Samantha seems to have inherited the sci-fi gene from Daddy. Now we don't actually show her full episodes of things, as most of it is too advanced for her, but she has seen a few minutes here and there. Enough that she can recognize "The Doctor" when I pause the TiVo and ask. David Tennant is "her Doctor", a term Dr Who fans will recognize. Anyway, as per the old blog entry, Samantha has always danced to the title sequence of (modern) Doctor Who. If I put it on, she gets all excited, and starts dancing around the floor. She seems to love it. I had it on tonight, and she started dancing around, only this time she shouted "DOCTOR WHO! IT'S DOCTOR WHO MOMMY!", which got both of us laughing. So she danced around a few more times, only in the middle of the title sequence, she said "Tardis!". For those who don't know, the Tardis is the blue box that is the Doctor's ship. Samantha recognized it, and pointed it out to us.

So we repeated the theme song a few times, and then stopped it on the logo in the titles, which I'm showing here.

She's 2 years 5 months, so we've been working on letters, alphabet, and rudimentary reading. She pretty much knows every letter of the alphabet, although she doesn't get it right 100% of the time yet. So when I paused it on the logo, I asked her "What are those letters?". She walked up to the TV, and read them in order.. D-O-C-T-O-R-W-H-O. That part was cool enough, but I took a step and asked "What does that spell?" I think we had to repeat the question a second time like "What do those letters say?", She said "Doctor Who!", which was a really cool moment. Lynn and I both laughed. Now, you could make the point that we were talking about Doctor Who anyway, and she just remembered it, but it seemed like she was reading it, which was cool to me on two levels - one as a parent, and two as a Doctor Who fan. So we repeated it again, and once she realized we were all happy, she got all excited about it, and started saying "Doctor Who!" several more times. BTW, she can also recognize a Dalek on screen too.

A little setup for the second part of this. I work for a game company, and as such, it allows me to continue to act like a kid myself into my 40's. I have quite a few toys on my desk at work, including a decent collection of Doctor Who toys. This past Friday I got two more things in, one was a fairly large (about a foot tall) replica of the Tardis. It's the current "hot toy" in Doctor Who fandom (it's really a Flight Control Tardis for any Who fans reading this). I had brought it home to show Lynn, and brought home a couple of the relevant figures to stand with it. When Lynn called the stuff "Daddy's toys", Samantha immediately wanted to play with them, saying things like "Daddy share his toys with Samantha!". I was a little leery of that, as I had visions of the Tardis exploded on our living room floor. I stuck the Tardis and the figures in our entertainment center for the weekend, and Samantha would point at them saying "Those are Daddy's toys!". Well, after the stuff I described above with the reading of the Doctor Who logo, I decided to let her hold the Tardis for a bit. I grabbed the camera (mostly because a friend Jake would love seeing the pics), so I snapped a few of her with the Tardis toy. It was quite cute actually, as the prop looks even larger with a two year old holding it. So after she held that for a bit (and figured out how to open the doors on her own), I took it back and let her play with the action figures a bit. When she was sitting there, I decided to push my luck and grab some of the Doctor Who DVD's off the shelf from previous Doctors and ask her who they were. She recognized David Tennant easily enough on TV, but the concept of other guys being "The Doctor" probably is foreign to her. I picked up a DVD from the original Doctor from 1963, an older fellow named William Hartnell. Asked her who that was, and she said "The Doctor". Showed her one from the sixth actor in the role during the 80's, Colin Baker. She also said he was "The Doctor". I just smirked at that, and decided it was time to end the Doctor WHo stuff, as she needed to get ready for bed.

While this is mostly a Doctor Who-centric post, I do have to admit to thinking it was very cool that my two year old daughter was able to read "Doctor Who" off the television. But the inner geek in me was loving the fact that my daughter also exclaimed "I love Doctor Who!" tonight.

Somewhere I see Jake & Lina smiling over reading this, too. :)

As my wife said in a recent blog entry (!), it's getting harder and harder to see the baby in Samantha. She's almost not even a toddler anymore. Oh sure, she does toddler stuff (random bursts of energy for no reason, thumb sucking, etc). But there's a lot "adult" about her. That story my wife told about the life flight helicopter was awesome.

I feel blessed to see her grow up. It's spectacular!

Well, thanks to Douglas Adams, on Monday I became the answer to Life, the Universe and everything. It was quite the fun birthday. I've found as I've gotten older, it's not about what I get. I'm sure the 13 year old me would be aghast at that, but it's true. For my birthday from my wife and daughter, I got one present from each of them, and it was good.

From my wife I got a DVD of a new version of one of my all time favorite movies, but one I never owned before. That was "Flash Gordon (1980)". From my daughter I got a Christmas tree ornament that said "Third Christmas" and was a cat. I got some $ from family back home, and it was great. But none of that even compared to the best present of the day.

That came from my two year old. At some point in the afternoon, I was on the sofa, and my wife had come over to give me a hug and a happy birthday kiss. Well, while she was doing that, my little girl also came over and put one of her special blankets on top of my lap, and then gave me this really huge hug. It was totally unprompted, and made both of us cry. My daughter's blanket was the best present I got on my 42nd birthday. Hard to beat that.

I've been a Star Trek fan for as long as I can remember. I won't relay that story again, but suffice it to say I have comitted more pieces of my brain to retaining Star Trek stuff than I probably should have. One of my all time favorite episodes is The Immunity Syndrome, where Kirk's Enterprise comes across this giant 11 thousand mile wide single cell amoeba. It's got some really nice charater interactions if you're a fan of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate of characters.

Anyway, since last September or so, the syndicated episodes of Star Trek TOS have been airing (here in Dallas on Sunday night at 9PM) in a new remastered form. I've rather enjoyed them, and they haven't been ruined at all in a "Greedo shoots first" way. Anyway, Immunity Syndrome was on last weekend, and I showed my little girl a few minutes of it. Maybe two or three minutes tops. But it was the bit where the crew first encountered the amoeba in the episode. When the following shot came on screen, it went off quickly, and Samantha said "What's that?"

So I backed it up on the TiVo, paused it, and said "Samantha, what's that?" My two year old daughter's response was "A FISH!" I've been watching Star Trek for 40 years. I've seen Immunity Syndrome I don't know how many times. After two seconds of my daughter watching it, she's trashed one of my favorite episodes, since I can't look at it now without thinking "Look, it's the fish!". I still like the character interplay, but my attempt to watch the episode again after her remark had a different feel. :)

Just got word from the other 50% owner in the biological experiment that is Samantha that our daughter burped tonight. Now that is not the big deal. The big deal is that she immediately followed it up by saying "Excuse me!".

That just goes to show that Samantha is both my daughter (burp), and Lynn's daughter (Excuse me).

I believe every parent has many of these moments, but Lynn just had one. I called her at work to say Hi, and while at work, Lynn said to me (about Samantha's toys):

"I put the fiddlesticks in the drawer with the doot-doots."

And then said "Oh yeah, I'm a mother". I immediately told her that line sounded like a blog entry, so here I am. It was so funny (to me), it's worth repeating.

"I put the fiddlesticks in the drawer with the doot-doots."

Gotta love these seriously adult conversations one has with a toddler living in the house.

This past week was the second Christmas with our daughter. Christmas 2005 was fun because it was the first one ever for Lynn or myself with a child. At that point, Samantha had just started sitting up, she was not independently mobile yet. She could roll, but was not crawling as I recall, so if you put her somewhere, she generally would sit there, and not move around.

Fast forward to Christmas 2006, and she's definitely NOT that baby anymore. She's got a well over 100 word vocabulary. She can talk on her own, understands way more than she can speak, and she's more or less a toddler now. We don't have a "baby" anymore, she passed that sometime in 2006 somewhere, although I don't know where. From what I can gather, one is still a baby and not a "toddler" until after they're two, but Samantha wasn't informed of that. She is standing straight in toddlerhood with both feet firmly planted (except when she jumps, which she just started doing two days ago).

So Christmas morning we got up before Samantha. We of course had everything set up from ourselves, and then there was of course Santa's visit. I got ready with the digital camera (in video mode), and captured Samantha's first look at her presents. Now she normally comes out and says "Hi" to the tree in the morning, but when she got around the sofa, she could see all the presents, and just stood there looking stunned. Once she recovered from that, she took a beeline for a doll that Mommy had bought her, "Cindy Baby!". She picked it up, hugged it, and fell immediately in love with the doll. This warmed my heart, because the doll was bought for her by Mommy, and it made Mommy feel great! Cindy Baby is now part of Samantha's regular daily routine. Cindy Baby is so important, that she's made it into the crib for "Night Night" (which Samantha also now will ask for when she's tired). There were plenty of gifts from the family that Samantha loved, but Cindy Baby was a highlight, and it was first. It set the tone for Christmas. She loved the simple toy - which is good on several levels.

What was most important to me that day was watching my daughter get so excited. As I write this, today is a day where Mommy is at work, and it's Daddy's day with Samantha. I was watching her play with a toy that I had gotten her for Christmas (A Fisher Price Little People School Bus, which she calls "Yellow Choo-Choo"), and it occurred to me that I finally "get it". Christmas is about watching your children be happy. It's such a stereotype before you have kids to say "I don't want them", or "I don't need them to be happy", and then all the other stereotypes people say about kids after they've had them. But one is so true, and that's that I feel so much happier in general now that I've had a kid. Samantha has been a true blessing from God, and we're lucky that she's such a happy child. She has her moments, sure - every kid does. But overall, she's a happy kid. Mommy & Daddy are very grateful for that.

This started out as a recall of Samantha at Christmas, but I ended up writing my feelings about Samantha at Christmas. I suppose that's the important part - not the gifts, which were nice. But my daughter's face at Christmas was the single best moment of the season for me.

I love my daughter way WAY more than I ever thought I would.

As my wife has written about, our little girl's vocabulary is now over about 100 words. She's strung together several words - mostly two word sentences, but some three. "Bounce the Baby" is one of the three - she says that when she sits on a pillow and bounces up and down on it. There's more that are two words "Baby Bye-Bye", and "Hi Daddy", and tons of 'em.

One thing that we've been trying to get her to say for awhile now is her name. She recognizes the word as her name, because if we ask here "Where's Samantha?", she'll point at herself and say "Baby". So she knows the name, but the words is obviously too difficult for her to say at this stage. So last night I decided to take another path. I said "Can you say Sam?" Much simpler. Much to my surprise she said it! Last night was the first time she said her name. Now she only said it once, but she did say it.

As cool as that was, one thing that Daddy found cooler was that she also said a word he's been trying to get her to say since birth.. That's "baseball". She said baseball once too. Daddy was all over that!

So last night Daddy got to initiate two words, Sam and baseball. It was a cool moment. Then we went right back to "bounce the baby". :)

I know toddlers all get these skills. They grow into adults, and that is not a surprise to me. Parents who are past this stage will go "Yup, remember that". However, this is my baby, and since it's happening to us, I'm quite stunned by it. I noticed today Samantha is able to properly translate commands; she can't verbalize a response, but she knows what you're saying and will do it.

We were sitting in Samantha's main play area, and she was on one side of the room, so I decided to see if she would remember something. I asked her "Samantha, where is Rose Tyler? (One of her dolls)". Samantha looked in the general direction of where the doll was (her rocker), and walked over to it, picked up the doll, and carried it to Mama.

Later on, she was walking around in the living room, and she walked by one of my baseball caps which had fallen on the floor from the sofa. So I said to her, "Can you bring Dada the hat?" She turned around, squatted down, picked it up, and walked over to me with it, hand outstretched with the hat. I was quite stunned, and almost moved to tears after this being the second time this has happened tonight. I then said "Take the hat to Mama", and she did that, too.

Speaking of Mama, I'm told that Samantha called Mama "Mama" today a few times, which she usually doesn't do, so that made Momma pretty happy. :)

She's also now saying "Choo-Choo" when we back up the truck to get out of the garage to go somewhere. That's pretty funny.

She defintely knows a lot, it's quite amazing to see it develop before my eyes like this. I thank God that he's blessed us with such a beautiful, smart, baby girl. I love my daughter.

My daughter has developed (quite on her own) a rather ham personality. Not terribly surprising who daddy is, but she was not influenced by me to do this. It appears now that when you point the camera at her, she has this really over the top grin. It's quite humourous to watch, actually.

But point the camera at her, and she'll stare into it and do this. :)

Anyone who reads this who is a parent of a kid that is at least as old as mine will probably recognize what I'm going to say. It will probably not come as a surprise to you.

It's been quite amazing to watch my daughter's personality come together recently. A lot of it gets unreported on, but there's so many little moments that are just ones I want to live in, and not be so worried about getting online and blabbing about to the world. My daugther is just over 14 months old, and already my photo collection on my computer has just about two thousand pictures of her. So I try not to get so caught up in "Oh, something happened, better log it". I do enough of that with pictures, so I don't want to worry about getting every moment down. But there are things worth talking about as she seems to have her own words for quite a lot of things. She knows what things are when we say them, she'll go get them, she's put a lot of it together. It's quite stunning to me to watch. While she can't say in English what she wants, she's figured out how to get the point across to us. However, there are words which are "right". She says cat well. She says "Cheese" pretty well, and the leads me into why I started this entry.

Today was daddy's day to watch Samantha as mommy was off at work. No problems there, I can handle that, although having a sore back isn't easy when trying to chase around a baby on the floor who can crawl at warp speeds. One of the things she seems to love a lot is cheese. One of the things we feed her is mild cheddar cheese. It's cut up into very small pieces, and we give them to her, and she'll go "MMMMMMMMMMMM" when eating it. She knows where the cheese is (the fridge), and if we go in there for something else, and she can see that, we usually get a "Cheeeese" out of her.

So today I was feeding her lunch, and today's lunch included some cheese. Well, this is where the funny comes in. Samantha has developed her own sense of humour. What we've done in the past is to interact with her during a feeding, we'll stick our head close and open our mouths and Samantha will "feed us". It's usually with Cheerios, but it works with other things too. However, lately, Samantha's sense of humour has come out with cheese. What she does is when you lean in for a bite, she'll put it close to your lips, and then snatch it back in a hurry, eat it and laugh at you. It's quite funny - as that's nothing we've obviously taught her, it's something she's started doing on her own. I of course had to get pictures of this, so I set up the camera in auto mode, and it took a bunch of pics - I got a couple from this today. Check 'em out below.

I now wonder what else Samantha finds funny in her mind which will surprise me. :)

One little amusing addon to this is that when Momma was giving baby a bath tonight, I mentioned that I was gonna make myself some Mac & Cheese for dinner. Not thinking at all about Samantha. She obviously heard the word cheese and went "Cheeeeeeeeeese!". It made both of us laugh, as neither of us thought anything of it. But Samantha heard "Cheese" for sure.

I love my daughter.

P.S. No, she didn't get that whole big block of cheese in the foreground of the pictures. Most of that went to Daddy.