My little cookie monster

| October 26, 2013

As much as Sam likes her sweets, it is not all sweets that she likes. Take cookies for instance. She loves animal crackers and my mom’s sugar cookies, but won’t eat chocolate chip cookies, Oreos, or most other kinds. Her favorite cookie by far is my mom’s sugar cookie. It is an old family recipe that came from my mom’s Grandmom Brynes, so I guess that makes them Sam’s Great-Great Grandmother’s cookies. It’s pretty cool that of all cookies, an old, well-loved family recipe is her favorite. My mom makes them for her on occasion, always at Christmas, but at other times of year too. I guess Sam had a hankering for them Monday morning because she asked me for them and when I said we didn’t have any, she insisted on calling my mom to tell her. Tuesday, my mom and Sam made cookies.  You can tell by the look on her face that she is loving every minute.

My mom let her wear this cat apron she has had forever and Sam loved it so much it came home with her.  It looks fantastic on top of her pajamas, which she refused to get out of that day, if I do say so myself.

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Sam actually is a good little cookie maker. She uses the cutters well and my mom even showed her the trick of shaking the cutter around a bit to loosen up the dough inside.  The only thing Sam needs to work on is trying to cut the cookies out in some semblance of order on the rolled dough. She tends to just plop the cutter down anywhere, instead of keeping her cuts close together, so you wind up rolling the dough a million times.

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I think her favorite part is decorating. She concentrates very hard on adding those sprinkles!

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Here are the finished cookies ready for the oven! The gigantic one on the top left is her dinosaur. Not sure why, there is no dinosaur cookie cutter, but that is what Sam said it is, so there you go. She likes all the people to hold hands so most of them get joined together. She is so sweet. Sam did note that, unlike Mommy, Grandmom does not have a girl cutter, just a boy. She wants that remedied right away, so we will have to work on that.

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The cookies turned out very tasty indeed!  Good work, Chef Samantha!

 

No boys allowed!

| October 23, 2013

I mentioned that we think Sam has been getting better at playing with the kids at school. She still has a long way to go though. Sam is still so timid when approaching other kids, and one day recently, she even told my mom that she doesn’t talk to the other kids because she doesn’t know what to say. I found that so horribly sad…. We have been working with her to give her ideas about what to say, like, she could tell someone she likes something they are wearing, or ask them if they have any pets, and so on.  It seems to be working, at least a bit, because she seems to be telling us more about playing with the kids at school.  But girls. Only girls. Believe me, she is not too fond of the boys. She is always saying she only plays with the girls. I tried to explain to her that boys are ok to play with, that her cousin Maddox is a boy, for example, and she loves playing with him, but she doesn’t budge in her mindset.

Today she came home telling us that she was playing with a ball at school and a boy took it. This upset her a lot. We figured out eventually that the teacher made the boy give it back to her. At any rate, it started her whole conversation again about how she doesn’t like playing with boys. Mark tried to explain that she can have boy friends as well as girl friends but she wasn’t having it. Finally, at one point, she told him she doesn’t like boys…but she likes “Boy Daddys”.  They are ok.  So there you go.  Daddy is ok.  But that’s it.

I have to tell you, as the mother of a daughter, who is dreading the boys she will someday bring home…that is fine with me!

Tea Time

| October 23, 2013

Last night Samantha hosted the most lovely tea party for her purple kitty cat and her hamster. She wound up with an unexpected guest…Zephyr! Zephyr loves fresh water and is always trying to steal it out of whatever cup we are using, so she came right over to Sam’s tea party to see what she could sneak. You can imagine how excited Sam was that Zephyr actually joined her party. She stayed for quite a few minutes, which was surprising, but made Sam’s whole day. It is so hard to get Zephyr to spend any time with Sam, although she is getting a lot more patient, so this warmed all of our hearts.

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Linvilla Halloween

| October 19, 2013

It’s that time again, Pumpkinland at Linvilla Orchards. We love taking Sam there and she loves Linvilla. Seeing the animals is always a hit, but she does love picking out pumpkins. As soon as we picked her up from school, off we went! It was a nice surprise for her.

The theme of the decorations this year seemed to be fairy tales, so of course, one of the first stops for pictures was the Cinderella display!

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She was not much in the mood to pose for pictures, but we convinced her to stop pumpkin hunting long enough to sit on the hay and smile for us.

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Sam has been seeing a lot of mums on people’s yards as we drive around, and I had promised her we’d buy some flowers. I wasn’t planning on necessarily buying them at Linvilla that day, but she was so excited, I couldn’t resist. She helped me pick all the colors she wanted.

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Back to pumpkin picking! Sam likes the tiny little pumpkins best of all.

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We also usually wind up buying a bunch of silly gourds just because she thinks they are funny. We bought three of these kind because, correctly so, she said they look like birds. We drew eyes on them when we got home.

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I can’t believe Halloween is right around the corner – stay tuned for pictures of Samantha in her costume!

Open House

| October 16, 2013

Tonight we had Sam’s open house at her school. Sam was so cute – we told her we were going to her school and she offered to give me her tote bag, and we had to “play school” before we left, where she walked us through what we were supposed to do. She even reassured me that there is a potty there if I need it. I thought it was so adorable because it was pretty clear she thought we were actually going to school like she does, as in, going to class. I guess she doesn’t really understand the concept of parent’s night.

It was our first real chance to see what was going on since she started there and Mark and I were anxious to go. It is a weird thing, like I mentioned in a previous post. She has this whole little life full of activities and people that we don’t really know anything about. I am so used to being part of every single tiny thing that ever happens to her.  To sharing everything, to seeing everything. And now I don’t really have that anymore. It is only going to get worse, I suppose, as she gets older, but it is hard to think about sometimes because in so many ways, as big as she gets, she is still my baby.

We looked around her classroom quite a bit to see what was there for them to do. We had seen a lot of it, of course, when we first went to school for orientation, but it was nice to see things with her name on them — her own little cubby, her art, and the books she talks about when she comes home.

There were stations set up with signs to let you know what things were, but the most helpful one just simply described their day.  First, the kids put folders in a basket, then they hang up their coats and tote bags, then they find name on the name board and on their carpet square. They sit on the carpet squares for circle time, which starts their day. While in circle time, the daily jobs are given out (who gets to do the calendar and dress the frog for the weather) and they are told the number of the day, who will be pray leader (they say grace before snack time) and who will be line leader. They also review the letter they are currently working on and discuss the things to do that day. It helped a lot to know what they do on a regular basis since Sam talks about things but sometimes it is hard to figure out what she means. Sam gets frustrated sometimes when we don’t understand, so this all definitely helped.

Most days, Sam comes home with a bunch of her daily artwork and class work in her folder, but occasionally they work on projects that she tells me they left at school. This was one of them. There was this really nice board full of pumpkins the kids drew faces on. Sam’s is near the middle, one up from the bottom. The teachers took pictures of the kids to put next to their pumpkins.

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Here is a close up of our girl’s masterpiece.

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All around the room were these adorable trees that the kids made by using artichokes that had paint on the leaves. It amazes me the things that these preschool teachers will do with a class full of 4 year olds. I can’t imagine the mess of paint and artichokes, but they manage to do it. Maybe I am not adventurous enough, but I would never attempt something like this at home! And somehow, I give them credit, she comes home completely clean.

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After seeing her class, we had the chance to talk to Mrs. McCann, her teacher. We discussed how we are not really concerned at all about her learning, because we are confident that she is, and we can see it every day, but we are more concerned about her social development. Mrs. McCann understood where we were coming from (it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Sam is a bit reserved) but it made my entire day when she told us that, just that very day, Sam had such a breakthrough, for lack of a better word. Mrs. McCann said that she and Mrs. Curran, the assistant, kept looking at each other like, “what happened here?” Sam was finally talking, laughing, and being engaged. She even came up to Mrs. McCann and commented that she liked her necklace.

That was exactly what I wanted to hear. It was such a relief to know that she is starting to relax and enjoy her days.  I know she likes school, but I do worry about my girl. I want her to have friends and I want her to feel included. That is a hard thing to accomplish when you are shy. But she is getting there.  Mark always tells me not to worry, that she will be just fine, and I know in my heart she will be, but…she is my girl. And her happiness is paramount to me. And anything that threatens that happiness, even herself, frightens me. It always will. That’s just part of being her mom, I guess. I am so proud of her. And I love her so much. And I do know, most of the time, that she will be more than fine, she will be great. She is great. She is phenomenal.