Neither rain nor hail nor sleet nor snow (LOL, JK!)

| February 7, 2010

So yesterday we got another tremendous snow storm, about 30 inches (76 centimeters) in our area. It was so bad, the mail service canceled mail delivery in most of the mid-Atlantic part of the county, the first time I have ever seen that happen. Pretty much everything shut down and it is still a mess out there today. Luckily, we were prepared with plenty of food and spent the day making homemade sauce and taking turns shoveling. Below are a few pics, these are starting to look pretty familiar aren’t they? No pics of Sam outside, it is too cold out there at only 17 degrees (-8 Celsius) for babies.

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I thought this pic is pretty funny, this is what 2 and half feet of snow on top of our mailbox looks like. As you can surmise, the snow had to pretty heavy and sticky to do this.

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This should give you an idea of the depth of the snow, the area on the right is grassy and is the same height as the sidewalk. Notice the cars completely plowed in under the snow.

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Oatmeal vs. Rice

| February 6, 2010

And oatmeal appears to win!  Since Sam was not loving her rice cereal, I decided to try oatmeal instead.  Everyone told me that it is more palatable (rice allegedly tastes like paste), so I thought it was worth a try.  Last night Sam had oatmeal for the first time.  I can’t exactly say she loved it, but I think she hated it less than the rice, so that’s something.  I thought maybe she needed a little more flavor, so I also tried giving her a little tiny bit of bananas.  Well, let’s just say Sam is so far NOT a banana fan.  The face she made was priceless.  She literally shook her head in that way that adults do when tasting something particularly horrible — you know, almost like you get the chills from the taste. I didn’t torture her too much with the bananas and stuck to oatmeal.  Today she did better with the oatmeal.  Almost all of it stayed in her mouth, and I even got a few smiles. I think she is just having trouble with the concept of solids in her mouth, but I will keep plodding away.  One day she will get it, and hopefully like eating solid food.  She was very interested in the pasta we ate tonight, so I told her no Italian food until she masters baby stuff first!

Sam and Mark

| February 1, 2010

I am really lucky that Mark is such a good photographer.  We have always had great pictures of us, our family, our cats.  But now more than ever I am glad that he is so good at his hobby because he captures the best photos of our little Samantha that I could ever want.  Every single aspect of her life has been documented and we probably have more photos of her in her first four months than most people have of their kids for their whole lives!  But as lucky as I am that I have such great photos of Sam, and me and Sam together, I always feel kind of bad that there are never as many photos of Mark as there are of everyone else.  He spends so much time with Samantha, and he loves her so incredibly much, that I wanted to capture those moments for him. So…I got behind the camera and started taking pics, and hoping that they came out as good as the ones he takes of me.  Truthfully, Mark DID set all the camera settings for me first, but I did have to capture the poses and the smiles.  I think I did pretty good.  Everyone looks happy : )

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