23 Months

Samantha is going to be 23 months on Friday, and since I neglected to even write a 22 month post, I figured writing this post two days early would be okay. These days it is hard to write a post about one child without including the other child. Now that Jake is moving all around and interacting with toys, Samantha and Jake play together and even if they aren't playing, they usually are occupying the same space. What usually happens is Jake will be minding his own business, when tornado Sam will swoop in and take whatever he is playing with, saying something to the effect of "no do dat Jake". The other likely scenario is that Jake will be minding his own business when all of a sudden he is surrounded by every single toy from the toy box because Samantha was getting him some toys to play with. Samantha loves Jake. She likes to be in his space and have him be in hers. She is very affectionate, giving hugs and kisses, and the occasional whack with a toy. One of her favorite activities lately is pretending to be Baby Sammy. Baby Sammy likes to be fed from a bottle, and rocked, and spoken to in a high pitched goo-goo-ga-ga voice. Samantha often speaks to Jake in this same tone.

Samantha has always been a busy girl, but lately she has kicked it up a notch. To use Samantha's words, she is just all over the place! She could easily have every toy out of the toy box, all the books off the shelf, the dvd's out of the cabinet, as well as all the pots and pans on the kitchen floor, the diapers and wipes all out of the changing table, and it doesn't stop there! She likes to be involved. If someone is doing something in the kitchen, Sammy like to be right there standing on a chair. She enjoys making pudding or helping Mammo to make dinner. She especially loves clean-up time when she gets to wash the dishes at the sink. We are never in want of a helper, because Samantha loves to help! And to her credit, she is very good at helping!

Samantha is starting to sing the beginning of the ABC song, and is able to recognize a few letters. The other week in the grocery store I was one aisle over from Chris and Samantha and I heard Chris say "That's right! That is good, I am so proud of you!" I asked later what she had done, and he said she was looking at a box of cereal, pointing and saying "letter P". It happened to be a box of some sort of alphabet cereal so Chris figured that there probably was a P somewhere on the box, but a closer look revealed that Samantha was indeed pointing directly to the letter P!

Samantha has been waking up a couple of hours after going to bed a few times in the past week. Not sure what that is about, but yesterday she didn't take a nap; just talked in her bed the entire nap time. I am hoping that this isn't leading to cutting out nap time quite yet!