Samantha's first blog

pamelamyers | March 14, 2013

Sam already picked out her own Easter dress this year while we were at Target (no sneak peeks of that dress, you have to wait until Easter!), but when I was at Carter’s a few weeks ago, I saw the most perfect dress for her to wear. I couldn’t resist buying it and figured I’d find an occasion for Sam to wear it. As I posted before, we were taking her Easter pictures recently and we asked her if she wanted to do more photos in a pretty dress. She excitedly said yes and happily got dressed. It was so cute. She was smiling like crazy and kept saying she looked like a princess. We agreed that she looked like the most beautiful princess ever.

Here is one of the first pictures. She wouldn’t let go of the little cat puppet.

This one shows the impishness on her face that is ever present in her personality.

She kept her arms around her back in a lot of the pictures. Mark and I thought she looked like she was trying to put on a typical model pose.

It amazes me how in some pictures she looks so sweet and innocent and young…

…and in the next looks so grown up. This is one of our favorites.

I love when Sam smiles because her smiles can light up a room, but I also love her more serious, pensive looks.

But yeah, the smiles are the best!

And the outright giggles are even better!

It was almost impossible for us to decide which pictures we liked the best. She was such a good model and gave us so many wonderful expressions.

I could look at her all day long. It still amazes Mark and I that we created such an amazing child.

We really try to not focus on her looks when we talk to her because she has so many wonderful qualities. I am always telling her how smart, how funny, how caring she is.  How clever and and talented.  But we also tell her how pretty she is, because, well, she is. And I think it is important for a little girl to feel pretty. I just try to not focus on it as being the most important thing. I know that in some ways life will be easier for her because she is pretty but I want her to think of her looks as an afterthought. Something she is lucky she has, but not essential.

One final shot…our cheeky girl! She is going to be a heartbreaker someday!

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pamelamyers | March 12, 2013

This morning I had to take Sammy to the doctor. She had started showing signs of a cold yesterday, but we were hoping it wasn’t much of anything.  Well….we were wrong. Overnight, Sam hardly slept. She crashed pretty easily for me, which I was happy about, but woke up about an hour later crying that her mouth hurt.  She was so visibly distressed that it was sad. I did get her back to sleep, but then she was up again. And again. Mark took her temperature and she had a fever of about 100. All night she was miserable and crying about her mouth hurting and asking me to please help her. Nothing in the world makes you feel worse than your child asking you to help and knowing there isn’t really much you can do. Finally, she wound up in our bed and she slept for a few hours. I was afraid she was having some sort of tooth trouble since she is such a pain about letting me brush her teeth, but in the morning, Mark had the idea that she probably meant her throat hurt and just didn’t know how to express the difference. After a few well placed questions we figured out that, yes, her throat was the culprit. I was a bit panicked since one of my co-worker’s toddler sons just had strep throat. Of course, I was paranoid. I called the doctor in the morning and told them I wanted her checked out, just in case. She did indeed have a fever, but a mild one. The pediatrician did a step test which thankfully came back negative, so it was just a cold. Poor Sammy girl.  I let her hang out on the couch with me all day and gave her lots of tv time. We took a long nap together in the afternoon which we both needed desperately! I just hope she gets better soon so that she sleeps again and so that I am not dealing with a sick little girl while Mark is in Germany next week!

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pamelamyers | March 11, 2013

Last night when I was reading to Sam while putting her to bed we were reading one of her new favorite books about ladybugs. As you go page by page, the ladybugs reduce in number from 10 to 1. She likes to count them on every page.  This time, when we got to the page with 8 ladybugs, she counted backwards all the way to 1! I was so proud of her.  She is great at counting, she can go to 25 pretty easily, but I didn’t think she could go backwards at all. Yet another accomplishment that seemed to come out of nowhere!

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pamelamyers | March 10, 2013

The latest and greatest photos that is! It has been a while since Mark has taken any posed pictures of Sam and we really wanted to have some new ones. She is getting so big and has changed so much in just the last few months since Christmas. Every time I look at her she looks more like a little girl and not like a baby. How quickly she is growing up!

Since it is just about time for us to take our annual Easter pictures it was the perfect opportunity to get everything ready in our home portrait studio. Sam still loves getting her picture taken and when we set up the studio, she can’t wait to pose. Before getting her in her dresses (yup…dresses, plural) Mark  took some preliminary shots of her in whatever outfit she chose.

This is one of Mark’s favorite pictures. It was early morning and Sam was still in her pajamas. She looks so happy, even first thing in the morning. I love morning pictures. Sam looks adorably rumply and just sort of natural, hair untamed and oh so casual.

She has become just like every other kid her age — you ask her to smile and you get a big toothy grin! At least in this one, her eyes weren’t all squinted closed like usually happens with the big grins. We have lots of those pictures…

Later, when I woke up, I got her dressed because we had her cousin Joey’s birthday party to attend. She had a blast and I thought she’d be tired, but nope, she was ready to go for more pictures. She insisted on wearing all of her beads that she had been playing with and also holding her Cat in the Hat. That Cat has become one of her current obsessions. It all started with the cartoon but she loves the book now too.

I got some of these cute smiles while making her giggle. Cat in the Hat was playing drums on her Daddy’s head. Strangely, putting pretty much anything on Daddy’s head while he is taking pictures is guaranteed to evoke bouts of laughter.

I’m not sure exactly what we were doing here, but her expression is priceless. She looks confused, amused, and annoyed all at the same time.

After a while, she wanted me to pose with her. I quickly brushed my hair and obliged. She didn’t want to smile at first because she was too busy talking to me, but a quick tickle did the trick!

Now it’s time for the Daddy’s Girl and her man to pose together. Sam is so in love with her Daddy. I am waiting for her to figure out what being married is because I know she will inevitably decide she wants to marry Daddy.

I am so glad this picture came out as well as it did, for a lot of reasons. One, because Mark takes such beautiful pictures of our girl that he deserves to have at least a few that he is in too. Two, because I love seeing my most favorite people together. Three, because I love how there is FINALLY a picture that helps to answer the question, “Where did all that red hair come from?” Now that Mark has grown out a full beard, you can see a lot of the red in it that was hard to see before. If you look at his beard, the red is all over, but most clearly seen on the bottom right of the photo. He has EXACTLY her hair color in his beard. I have bits of her color as well, but sadly, as I have aged, my hair has too and you can’t see the red highlights as much as you used to, unless I am in direct, bright sunlight. But there. There is your answer, world. Our beautiful, ginger haired daughter got our hair from US. 🙂

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pamelamyers | March 10, 2013

One of the very coolest things about having a child this age is witnessing such an amazing imagination. The things that come out of Sam’s mouth now alternate between being hysterically funny to incredibly thought provoking to just silly. I love watching her build things or describe things to me. Lately, she has been fascinated by shadows. Looking for them, making them, describing them, everything about them. The other morning she saw a shadow in our bedroom (that I never did see because it was so insanely early to be awake my eyes wouldn’t open). She was very excited and told me it looked like it had a hat on, like a cowboy. I didn’t even know she knew what a cowboy was, much less what one looked like.

Today, we were outside playing and she was dragging around this mini rake that we use to clean up flower beds and such. She started out by pushing it all around our yard and told me she was mowing the lawn. She then progressed to running wildly down the sidewalk, giggling the whole time, while telling me that she was mowing the pavement. On the way back to our house (for the third or fourth time) she held the rake into the air and told me it was her kite. Every few pavement blocks she would stop and tell me we were at the park where you can fly kites. Each time she stopped she would say, “We are at a new park now” and I’d ask her what was at the new park. Her answers varied from a stream, a bush, to “just some grass”.

It is a shame that as we get older we tend to see the world in such boring terms. We seem to lose the ability to stop and slow down and see interesting things, to make up stories, to be creative. It comes so naturally as a child to suspend reality and just become something else because you feel like it. To see things that are not there, or to dream up stories about the things that are. Having a child and experiencing the world with them, the way they see it, is like heading down memory lane to your own childhood. And it’s a pretty great trip.

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