Little Things

You never realize how many acronyms surround us until you have a child who is learning to read. Sam is constantly being baffled by “words” without vowels. I try to explain it to her, but she is so excited by reading that she doesn’t care. And I don’t want to dampen that enthusiasm, so I don’t correct her very often. Today, she cracked me up by reading “Hubble.”  ”Mommy, look – it says Hubble! Hubble! Hubble!”  She was pointing at my computer screen so I looked for an ad for something space-related, until I realized that she was reading, “HBL.”

So we’re at the National Air and Space Museum, and we’re looking up at satellites which are hung way up high on the ceiling of the hangar. Sam asks what they are, and Adam and I struggle to explain:

“They’re machines that stay up in the sky and fly around the earth.”

We read the placard:

“Tracking and relay data satellites.”

That didn’t help.

“They orbit the earth. They just keep going around and around.”

“And we send signals up to them and they send them back down.”

Finally, I think of something that Sam knows about.  I say, “Signals are things like your voice on the phone. You can talk on the phone and your voice goes way up high to the satellite and then it comes back down to another phone so someone else can hear you.”

Sam looks up at the satellite and yells, “ECHO!!!”

On our way to Red Lobster for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, Adam and I were trying to talk up how great lobster and crab are. (Sam has had crab, but it had been a long time.)

Since she loves butter, I told her that the best part about crab and lobster is that you get to dip them in butter. I said, “It comes with a huge bucket o’ butter!” Sam loved that:

Sam: “We’re going to get a bucket o’ butter! And a clump of crab!”

Me: “Yes! And lots of lobster!”

Sam: “And a mountain of mashed potatoes!”

Me: “And bread – how much bread will we get?”

Sam: “A bathtub of bread!”

See what I mean about her creativity?

I often use Faber and Mazlish’s parenting trick of giving Sammy her wishes in fantasy. (Here’s a great video describing the technique.)   Today, I used it a bit differently.  Sammy banged her shin and she handled it herself, holding it and taking deep breaths and saying “ow ow ow,” but not screaming or whining or asking me to kiss it.  I felt so proud of her for taking care of herself, and yet I cringed to see her in pain.  I said, “Sammy, whenever I see you get hurt, I wish I could just clap my hands and make the pain go away.”  As I said it, I slapped my hands together quite violently.  Sammy said, “Yeah, but you can’t do that, because that would make it hurt worse.”

Adam:  Are you feeling angry, Sammy?

Sammy [in an angry voice]:  I’m NOT angry.  I’m just a little bit angry.  And if I keep talking to you, I might get MORE angry.  And then I’m going to go to my room and think about what you did to me!

When I was pregnant with Sam, I decided that a good glider was a high priority baby item.  I hated the look of most gliders, though.  In Michigan, it was hard to find any furniture at all that wasn’t “country” style, and gliders were the worst.  We couldn’t afford the chair that I really wanted, but Adam’s parents kindly got it for us as a gift.  It was the only chair that was big and cushy, but which wasn’t too deep for my short legs.  It also looks somewhat like a normal chair, and not just a baby diner.  I was disappointed when I saw the reddish-orange color – it’s so hard to pick fabric from those tiny swatches – but other than that, it’s been the perfect chair.

I spent countless hours in the “orange chair,” nursing Sam.  We kept it in our bedroom for the middle-of-the-night feedings.  It got milk stains all over it, but it cleaned up just fine.  We had to put it in storage when we were moving around, but it came through to Virginia unscathed.  Then we put it in Sam’s room, even though I wasn’t nursing her any more.  We read to her in that chair every night before she went to bed, until she moved into her big-girl room and her big-girl bed.  Then, there wasn’t room for the orange chair.  We left it in the “nursery” – Sam’s old room.

Now, when Sam can’t sleep at night, she gets up and goes into the nursery and sits in the orange chair.  She just rocks until she feels better.  Sometimes she puts her stuffed animals to sleep on the orange chair, covering them up with a blanket.  When she wakes up grumpy and needs some cuddling, she asks for me to sit with her in the orange chair.  After every bath, Adam or I give her a “drying hug” in the orange chair, and tell her Little Bear stories there.

I don’t know if two babies plus me will fit in the orange chair.  But I do know that we’ll continue to find some use for it.  I look forward to many more happy memories with my precious, orange chair.

Before her nap today, Sam said, “Mommy, I want to read The Cat in the Hat today because it has Thing 1 and Thing 2 in it.”

Today, I had to prove to Sam that I was not hurting the cat when I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and that, yes, it is different than when she pinches him. Thank you, YouTube, for giving me instant access to videos of momma cats carrying their young, because when I explained it to Sam, she simply did not believe me. And that is today’s Little Thing: Sam no longer believes everything I say. You go, girl!

We had alphabet tater tots (yes, they make such a thing!) for dinner, and Sam had the letters S, B, O and O.  She put them together and sounded out: SOOB.  ”What’s soob, mommy?”  ”It’s a nonsense word – you just made it up – but you sounded it out just right.”

Then she ate one of the Os and I told her I saw a real word she could make (thinking of “sob”).  She put together BOS and said with the pride of reading in her voice: “Boss.  Just like when I boss you around!”

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Adam’s phone made it’s low-battery chirp and I looked around in confusion. Taking the phone out of his back pocket, he said, “That was me.”  Sam said, “No it was not.  That was your phone.”

I don’t know which I’m more proud of: the fact that Sam can spell out H-I-C to sound like “hick” or the fact that she is so unfamiliar with the drink, Hi-C, that she pronounces it “hick.”

Sam and I were doing laundry and I asked her to unload the dryer while I pulled the line-dry stuff out of the washer.  She removed each article of clothing individually, dropping them in the hamper and saying each time, “Drag and drop. Drag and drop.”

“Mommy, how old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Wow. That’s a lot.  I’m not going to be forty until…until…until I’m older.”

Adam:  So what do you think, Sam – should I grow a beard?

Amy:  He’d look like grandpa.

Sam [in the saddest, cutest, little-girl voice you can imagine]:  No, daddy. Don’t grow a beard, because then you’d look like grandpa and I’d never see you again.