What a funny girl...

She had a thing for making this face all day on Saturday when the camera was on her. I genuinely believe this is her smile. Then I got this one out of her, but she doesn't even really look like herself.
What can I say? This kid's a nut.

I ♥ Donating Blood

I gave blood this afternoon. The nurses there were thanking me left and right as if I was the only person in the world qualified to give blood, and I was gracious enough to do so. When they found out that I don't even work in the hospital the blood drive was in, they just about fell over themselves. They could not believe that somebody would actually use their lunch hour to drag themselves out into the cold, drive to the hospital, and donate their blood.
Dude, I got to watch Dr. Phil, eat free oreos, potentially save a life, and I get to skip my workout for tonight guilt-free. Oh, yes, and I get to wear this uber-cool red bandage around my arm until 8:00 toinght. What's not to love about that?Sure, the finger prick for the iron test sucks, and I can't even think about watching as they stick the needle into my arm (very squeamish about that stuff), but other than that giving blood is a very welcome break time for me. I was actually pretty bummed a year and a half ago when I found out I couldn't donate blood while I was pregnant with Samantha. Something about the baby needing the blood...I'm sure they know what they're talking about.
Yes, so, the moral of the story is: Go give blood so those nurses quit acting like I'm a hero whenever I do! Only 5% of the people in America who are able to give blood actually do. Sorry folks, but that's pathetic. I know, I know, some people legitimately can't do it because of medical reasons. I'm not talking about you. Everybody else needs to get over their fear of needles, look away when they stick you (like I do!), and do their part to save a life. Because honestly, you never know if that life is going to be yours, your husband's, your child's...you get the idea.

GO GIVE BLOOD!

Just another video

Apparently the intro to The Today Show intrigues her. If you listen closely you can hear it in the background while she's staring off at the TV.

Stitches, be gone!

Well, today was the day.
We took Samantha back to the ER to have her 3 stitches taken out. Thankfully the nurse that we really liked on Saturday night was working again. She remembered Samantha and was very sweet to her.
Just like any other child her age, Samantha is not a big fan of people going near her face with needles, scalpels, and tweezers. Both on Saturday and then again today we had to wrap her up on this papoose board restraint thing. We'll just say she wasn't a big fan. Only after everything was all said and done did I do any reading about these papoose boards. Apparently there are people out there who believe these are of the devil and will traumatize any child who is wrapped up in one. I can imagine that it wouldn't be a good idea to use one on a daily basis, but I really do believe that if she hadn't been wrapped up in this thing the doctor never would have been able to stitch her up.

Here she is, post stitch removal. She's lookin' pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Music Bear

I am happy to report that Samantha is doing as well as we can expect her to be right now. She's happy, playful, and very adventurous. Her stitches should be coming out on Thursday, which will no doubt be traumatic, but it's another stop on the road to recovery.
Last night she tried her hand at running, which wasn't really a good idea because she's still working on walking. She was super giggly, and ended up wiping out when her feet were moving too fast for her body. All it took was her pacifier and a little cuddle with Music Bear to make her feel better.Music Bear was one of my favorite stuffed animals growing up. He used to have a music box in his back (hence the name) but it broke long ago. Now he has an empty zipper pouch in his back, but the name stuck. A few weeks ago Samantha saw him sitting on her dresser, looked at me, and reached for him. He's been her buddy ever since. She sleeps with him, holds him in the car, plays with him at home, and just loves him to death. Most mornings when we take her out of the crib she has a death grip on his hand so he doesn't get left behind. He made the trip with us to the ER on Saturday, and I think we have him to thank for her being a little bit calmer than she might have been without him. He looks a little old, which makes sense when you consider that he's probably been around for 25 years, but he's in great shape. I had hoped that she would pick a newer stuffed animal to be her favorite so I would have an easier time replacing it if anything happened to it, but it's kind of sweet to see her love something that I used to love when I was little. We're also working on transitioning to a sippy cup, which is messy, but necessary. I snapped this picture of her last Friday, watching Baby Einstein with her sippy cup after we got home from work/Grandma Shirley's. I wish I could lay on the floor and watch TV while somebody made me dinner.

worst day of my life

Right now I'm sitting here staring at my keyboard because I have no idea how to write all this down. I want to deflect how mad I am at myself by trying to bring my usual sense of humor to this post, but even if I did that it wouldn't change a thing. I would still be so very angry with myself for letting this happen.
Last night Katie bit Samantha on her face. Samantha had to get 3 stitches, and has a lot of brusing on both cheeks and her forehead, but otherwise she's doing great. Chris and I, on the other hand, are so mad at ourselves that words just can't fully describe how we feel.
It all happened so fast. Samantha was playing on the floor with me, Chris was on the couch with Katie. Samantha pulled herself up and was walking along the couch towards Chris. Out of nowhere Katie lunged at her and knocked her to the ground. All I can do is thank God that it wasn't any worse and that Chris & I were right there when it happened.
It's the worst feeling in the world to know that if we had gotten rid of Katie months ago, or if I had just pulled Samantha away from the couch this wouldn't have happened. Everyone is telling us that things like this happen, and we shouldn't beat ourselves up over it. Nothing that anyone says makes me stop wishing that this could have happened to me instead, because it breaks my heart to see my little girl's face like this.
If you've ever been in a situation where you felt like you deserved the Worst Parent in the World Award, go ahead and send it my way. I couldn't have earned it more if I tried.

Can you say AWESOME?!?!

My sister sent me a rediculously early birthday present (my birthday isn't until March), and it's awesome! We now have a video camera that records videos without that obnoxious clicking noise. Oh, and you can actually see the video instead of those odd looking fuzzy outlines that I tried to tell you were Samantha in my other videos.
Thank you to the blog police! You totally made my day!

(apparently blogger's video dealie isn't working tonight, so I'm going to upload this video to our youtube account as well.
<---- There's a link for it to your left)

Naps Naps Naps

Oh boy, do I have some progress to report!
This week has been the week of naps. I've finally gotten the guts to tackle Samantha's napping routine, and I am so glad I did!
Saturday and Sunday were days at home (of course) and we were shooting for 9 and 3 as nap times.
On Monday and Tuesday I left work at 9 and 3 to go put Samantha down for her naps at Grandma Shirley's. The morning naps went great both days, but the afternoon nap was a struggle. She cried the whole time on Monday, and ended up napping from 1 until 2 on Tuesday.
Today has convinced me that we might be over the worst of it.
She went down without a sound (and without me!) at 8:50 this morning. She slept for an hour and a half!
This afternoon she went to sleep at 2:00. No word yet on how long that nap lasted, seeing as I am at work and it's only been an hour since Shirley called me to let me know Samantha was settling down for her "3:00 nap".
I don't want to say it too soon, but I'm getting a hint of the sweet smell of success...

Hair

Before: (I can't remember what the goofy expression was for)

After: Yes, I am quite possibly one of the least photogenic people on planet Earth. After looking at these pictures I felt like I needed to acknowledge that.
I think I had about 3 inches whacked off my hair, and it's definitely darker now. With the black shirt it's kind of hard to tell how long my hair is. It goes just a bit past my shoulders now.
I'm sorry to the blog police ::coughKiera:: I have no new pictures of Samantha to post. Get over it and enjoy the pictures of my new hair. :)

Post #100!!!

Is that an extremely sad thing that I have devoted enough of my free time to have written 100 blog posts? I didn't think so either.
This weekend has been mellow enough that we decided to really focus on getting Samantha's napping routine down. She hates taking naps, and despite all the amazing things The Sleepeasy Solution book did for our night time sleeping, we never really devoted ourselves to fixing her daytime snoozes. People, things have changed.
On Saturday we watched her cues very closely and saw that she was starting to get irritable around 9:00. It was only 2 hours after she had woken up, but she obviously needed some rest. Into the crib she went. She wasn't happy to be in there, but after about 20 minutes of protesting (loudly) she finally fell asleep. She napped for nearly an hour (!) before she was standing up demanding to be brought downstairs. Her afternoon nap fell at about 3:00, and it only took her 15 minutes to fall asleep. I give her teddy bear all the credit for this nap. She talked to him for about 10 minutes after she quit screaming and then fell asleep with her arm around him.
Today we stuck with the 9:00 and 3:00 naptimes, and it fared about the same. She screamed and acted like she was going to die when I put her in the crib, but within 10-20 minutes she fell asleep both times. My tentative plan is to split my lunch time between 9:00 and 3:00 this week so I can go lay her down for her naps at Grandma Shirley's. I'm hoping that the consistency of the same person putting her down for a nap in a different place will help her to realize that she needs to get some sleep. If you remember to, please pray for her to handle this well, because her track record with naps is not so good.
Yesterday we broke out the fridge magnets, which turned out to be kind of fun. I think that if we were able to record the 'words' that come out of Samantha's mouth they would actually look like the gobbledy gook that is jumbled all over the fridge in this picture.
She hasn't figured out how to put the magnets back up yet, but she has a blast wiping them down onto the ground.

Keep walking...but you won't knock down our wall!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is Veggie Tales, the title for this post is a snippet of lyrics from one of their songs. It's a really cute series of Christian cartoon movies for kids. Anyhoo, we're here to read about the fact that Samantha is walking! This link should get you to the video of her and her zombie like walking. I apologize (again) for the terrible quality of our videos. Someday we will have the $ to invest in a better camera. Until then you get grainy videos and you'll just have to take my word on what you should be seeing in them. Tonight was another night when Samantha decided that hiding in the quilt rack sounded like an extremely fun thing to do. She's such a random kid sometimes.

11 Months...

In a month Chris and I will have a 1 year old living in our house with us. No, we aren't adopting a 1 year old kid. Samantha will be turning a year old! I can hardly believe it. Okay, she turned 11 months last Friday. I'm a few days behind, but I'm close enough.
It's been awhile since I've posted, and that's mostly because nothing has really been happening by us. Samantha recovered from her fever pretty quickly, and since then we've just been doing our everyday thing.
Samantha is getting closer to walking everyday. She's getting braver and much more confident. I don't want to speak too soon, but I think she just might be using walking as her primary mode of transportation by her birthday. We'll see...
She has learned how to climb the stairs though, and now if we happen to forget to put the gate up she will zoom right over there and try to demonstrate just how quickly she can work her way up them. Having a baby on the verge of becoming a toddler sure does require constant vigilance!

We decided to try those Gerber biter biscuits last weekend as a special treat for Samantha to have occasionally. Yep, they're messy, but she loves them. You should see her when we have spaghetti for dinner...definitely a diaper only kind of meal.
For Christmas Chris and I gave her this dragon blanket. It's supposed to be the dragon (who she loves) from the Baby Einstein videos. It doesn't really look like him, but she likes the blanket. The head is a puppet, so we can make him talk. He also has some satiny material on his belly.
Of course, she is all about reading her books! Sometimes I catch her on the floor flipping through the pages of a board book and babbling to herself like she's actually reading it. No kidding, she stops and 'talks', then she turns the page and does it again.
That's what's been going on with us. Hope things have been good with you!

Happy New Year!

What a weekend we had! I'm not even sure where to begin...
For starters, I only had to work half the day on New Years Eve. Samantha and I were able to enjoy an afternoon of running errands and hanging out at home. After Chris came home from work we headed over to our friends' house for dinner. They have a little girl who is about 9 months older than Samantha so those two got to play for a bit. We wanted to hang out and watch a movie with them, but Samantha has gotten so set in her bedtime routine that she turns into a mess when she doesn't get to bed on time. So we left one of the movies with them and watched the other one at home.
New Years Day was filled with more running around and hanging out at home. Chris went out in the subzero temperatures for some deer hunting in the afternoon (can you say crazy?) while the girl and I stayed nice and warm at home.
The real highlights of the weekend started on Saturday. I went out to the local consignment shops with a friend of mine on Saturday afternoon for a little bargain hunting and yet again hit the mother load. It seems like every time I shop with her I find exactly what I'm looking for and she finds nothing. So goes it. I just hope she doesn't stop bargain hunting with me because of it!
I was looking for some kind of play tent for the living room. Our church has this really cool Playskool kiddie tent in a couple of the nursery rooms and Samantha usually gravitates to them when she's in there. I wanted to find something similar for her to have at home. We walked in the doors of the last consignment shop and wouldn't you know it, that exact same tent was sitting right in the entryway. The price tag told me they were asking $40 for it, which (in my opinion) was pretty steep for a used tent. I walked around the shop, snagged a couple bags of peek-a-boo blocks (15 of them for $5!),

and decided to offer the cashier $20 for the tent. She didn't even flinch before she said 'sure'. Woo hoo! What a steal!
(Listings on ebay for this tent range from $15 + shipping to $299!)
We also found this super cute toy birdhouse with 4 little birds. I admit that I probably like it more than Samantha does, but she likes shaking the birds because the rattle. I guess we probably shouldn't get any pet birds if that's the way she's going to treat them!On to Saturday night. Everything seemed normal when we put Samantha to bed, except she woke up crying a little bit 2 or 3 times within a couple of hours. When she woke up crying around 11:00 I went up there to check her out. The minute I picked her up I could tell she had a fever. She was hot and just not acting like herself. We took off her pj's, changed her diaper and gave her a bottle. Her temp was just under 101°, but we were still worried. She has honestly never really had a fever or been seriously sick before, so we had no experience in dealing with that. We ended up paging our doctor and talking with him for a bit. We were able to get her fever down with some ibuprofen, and she slept pretty well (with us) for the rest of the night.

On Sunday morning she seemed fine, so off to church we went. By the time we got home around 10:30 her fever was back, she was kind of pale, and all she wanted to do was sleep. A treatment consisting of cool washcloths, fever reducer, bottles, and naps took up our whole day on Sunday. Her fever peaked out near 102° and at some points dropped down to 97°. It was so strange to have her sleeping most of the day, because if you know Samantha you know that she's constantly moving and getting into things!This morning she was still warmer than normal, but acting more like herself. All depending on how she is when I see her at lunch we may be making a visit to the doctor this afternoon. We're pretty sure her system is just fighting off this cold that she has, but when you're an overprotective first time mom you just can't be too careful. :)
Here's hoping that tomorrow I can put up a blog post telling you how great she's doing and that her fever is gone!