Dear Samantha Joy,: Nothing New...This Week

Dearest Sammie,

Happy 17 weeks sweetie! There haven’t been a whole lot of major milestones going on this week (hey, every busy girl’s got to take a rest sometime, I understand). In fact, this past week has been kind of…boring. And given the excitement and craziness of the past month (heck, the past four months), I’m totally okay with taking a break from the chaos for a very lovely “boring” week.

As the school year goes on, I’m getting more settled and used to the idea that I’ve joined the working mom club. As in…I have to go teach while your father gets the joy of staying home with you.

I think it’s harder on me than it is on you, because frankly, you and your father seem to be quite content to be two peas in a pod. He’s still getting a kick out of watching you feed yourself from a bottle (last night he proudly proclaimed that you had fed yourself “95% of the time”). He’s also leaving the comforts of his chair more often and getting down on the ground to chat with you on the activity mat. For someone who teased me so mercilessly for saying “ooga booga” to you to get you to smile, he sure has been using that phrase quite often. He even wrote it on the bathroom mirror this morning, after wishing me a good day!

While your father’s been using what only can best be described as the new Vogt household catchphrase, you and I have settled into a (dare I say it?) ROUTINE. When I come home from school (seriously 2:30 cannot come soon enough), if you’re not taking an afternoon nap, I’ll pick you up and chat with you. Usually, you’ve got quite a bit of things to say. Then it’s time for a bottle followed by naptime for an hour and a half while I get dinner ready. Once you wake up, we chat and play a little more, hanging out on your mat and putting you on your stomach so you can continue to lift your head up and strengthen your upper body muscles.

Around eight, I take you into your bedroom where we begin our bedtime routine: onesie, diaper change, swaddle and book. The book part was a new thing. Your Nonni pointed out last week that you really like to be read to, so I’m trying my best to read to you every night. It’s amazing how you sit and stare at those books, taking each page in as I read to you from your growing library. This week, we’ve been reading Sandra Boynton’s ‘Going to Bed Book.’ The lyrical rhythms have been doing a pretty good job of lulling you to sleep, because when we finish and put you in bed with a quick kiss and cuddle, you’re usually pretty content to lie in your crib and watch your mobile for a few minutes before turning to the clown/star/blue thing next to you and falling asleep.

Note that I said *usually* it works. Last night, I came home from a late night of teaching my college class in Visalia and was surprised to see that you weren’t in bed yet. I guess you had gotten pretty used to our little routine, because when I came home, Daddy and Grandma Max told me about the fit you had thrown a half hour before. They couldn’t calm you down…but they also hadn’t gotten past step two of the onesie/diaper change/swaddle/book technique.

I picked you up from Grandma Max’s arms, and you pretty quickly woke up and proceeded to sigh and tell me how your day was. It was almost like you were saying “Mom, I tried everything to get them to listen to me and follow our routine, but it didn’t work. I gave up and just fell asleep in Grandma’s arms instead.” You melted my heart, last night, kiddo.

I didn’t want what happened last night to happen again next Wednesday night when I teach again, so I had your father watch as I executed our bedtime ritual. This would be why I said that *usually* you like to be read to at night. Last night, of all nights, you decided to fuss as I read to you. With your father watching. So now he doesn’t believe me when I say that you like book time. Hmph. At least you fell asleep fairly quickly—I don’t think you were awake 10 seconds after I put you down.

So…that’s the boringness that was this week. I did spend sometime last weekend sticking you in your bumbo and taking what can only be described as an insane amount of pictures. I think you like getting your picture taken, because when I moved the camera over your head to get a picture of the bow you were wearing, you moved your head to face the camera. So then I moved the camera to the right—and again, there you were following the camera. This went on for a while—camera shy, you definitely are not. You really are my daughter!

You enjoyed making funny faces...