Samantha's first blog

pamelamyers | November 23, 2015

Today was our parent teacher conference at school. Mark and I were anxious to talk to Sam’s teacher to make sure she was doing well in school. We thought she was, but you just never know. It was a quick 20 minute or so appointment, and I didn’t really have anyone to watch Sam, so I decided, to heck with it. She is a big girl. She can sit in the hallway and amuse herself with my Kindle while we meet with Ms. Cipolloni. When we got there, one of the tables outside her classroom happened to be set up with crayons and a bunch of turkey and other Thanksgiving pages and Sam sat outside, quiet as could be, coloring and eating her snack.

Anyway, we met with her teacher and to sum it up, Sam is doing really well. She is still one of the quieter group of kids, but she does have her friends, she gets along well with everyone, and she does talk in class both voluntarily and also even when she doesn’t raise her hand and the teacher calls on her. We discussed her progress reading and she is pretty much average. Not doing better than she should be, and not doing worse. I talked to Ms. Cipolloni about how she just recently seemed to have an interest in learning to read, she tries to find her sight words and she is trying to spell things. I related a time recently when Sam wrote something and asked me if I could read it. It was hard to understand, but one of the words she tried to write was “hopped”. She wrote it “hpt”. She has done this before. When spelling words, she tends to skip all the vowels. Her teacher said it is perfectly normal at this age, the vowels are the hardest for kids to understand, and that frankly, it was impressive that she even used the “p” since most kids at her age are very focused on the beginning and end sounds and skip over the middle entirely. So, she is doing great. Sam likes her homework, likes reading her 100 book challenge books, and she loves school. And she does seem to be learning, not only reading, but math and science as well. I can’t ask for much more than that.

Hopefully, she will continue in that vein and be off and reading for real soon!

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pamelamyers | November 21, 2015

Sam loves getting the mail. She loves mailing mail. She is pretty obsessed with mail, to the extent that she even drew a picture to give to our postman.

One day, Mark was mailing a bunch of boxes for some stuff he sold and she asked him if she could have one. This is why. She is so sweet. She put it in the door and left it for me. My sweetest girl. 🙂 I just love her so much.

 

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pamelamyers | November 15, 2015

We were getting our leaves ready for collection by the Township this week and I decided to rake together a lot of my neighbor’s leaves that were on his lawn near the driveway. Our neighbor generally does his own, but he was babysitting his granddaughter and couldn’t get outside. I figured if I didn’t take care of at least that part of his leaves, they would just wind up blowing all over our driveway and lawn.

At any rate, Sam had zero interest in helping this time, so she was inside playing or watching TV or something. I started raking the mounds of leaves from the grass onto the driveway so Mark could use the blower to get them to the front of our lawn when suddenly I saw a tiny little snake! It was so cute. I obviously disturbed his little nest of leaves. I quickly ran in to get Sam but by the time she got outside it was gone. They are quick little suckers. Well, I kept on raking and suddenly, there it was again. Sam was so excited to see a real snake! She liked it so much she decided it’s name was Sherman. She needs everything to have a name.

We left Sherman alone and he slithered off to parts unknown. Nice meeting you, Sherman!

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pamelamyers | November 1, 2015

Yesterday was Halloween and it was time for pumpkin carving and trick or treating. We don’t carve a pumpkin every year but this year Sam really wanted to. She picked the pumpkin out herself. We waiting until the last minute, but hey, we still got it done!

Sam drew the design she wanted to make. Such concentration!

She loves him already!

I don’t think she really remembers the last pumpkin we carved because she kept talking about wanting to know what was inside. When Mark opened it up, she was pretty grossed out, but she still got her tools and helped dig out the goo.

Carving time! Mark did the hard parts with a knife, then Sam helped with her special pumpkin carving tools. She did a pretty good job. That girl loves tools, just like her Dad.

Ta da! Mr. Pumpkin, ready for the trick or treaters.

We had decorated quite a few pumpkins this year, and here they are. Sam did all of them herself.

Sam likes the little “hugging” pumpkins.

Our jack o’ lantern looks pretty good all lit up at night, I think, and our house looks pretty good for Halloween.

Every year, Sam wants Mark and I to dress up. This year, Daddy was Batman and I was Catwoman.

The fight is on! Poor me, I am outnumbered by the good guys.

Penelope came out to see what was going on (not Zach, he is not too happy with the outdoors).

We had invited Julia to come trick or treating with us and the girls had a great time!

The haul! More candy than she ever got, for sure. We walked really far and the girls had a blast.

Happy Halloween!

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