Samantha

Given how fast the first year of Samantha's life has flown by, I might need to have another 10 kids in order get my full dose of the infancy stage. As of Sunday, we no longer have an infant--Samantha is one year old. It has flown by and I'm a little sad. I know having an infant has its drawbacks too, particularly the first 3 months, but we have enjoyed our little baby so much this past year.

Personality oozes out of her--in public, she stares at strangers until they look at her--and as soon as they do, she lights up with a huge smile. She eats everything under the sun--often times much more than Ella does now. She is a total snuggler and loves to play with people's hair. She is the proud owner of 12 teeth...to which Brian says, "We gave birth to a little piranha." Her preferred mode of transportation is crawling, with very little interest in being up on her feet. Our pediatrician says she may be a late walker given her 95th percentile head circumference...that trait comes from the Bowcut genes, not mine.

And then the screaming...she screams like a banshee. I was telling my friend Anne the other day about how horrible the screaming is. We stopped at the grocery store the other day for 20 minutes. From the time we entered the store, to the time we left, she screamed, an ear-piercing, lunatic scream. Not because anything was wrong..she wasn't crying...just screaming cause she felt like it. Sales people came to ask if they could help. Other shoppers came and said, "oh it's you who has the little screamer--I heard her 5 aisles over". Or, "it's pretty cute when it's not my kid screaming." For the first 10 minutes I tried covering her mouth with my hand. Then I decided I needed to just hurry and book it out of there. A cute, but maniacal little thing. Today I had Samantha, Ella and friend Nora in the car. Ella and Nora were happily playing in the very back seat of the van. Samantha, seated in the middle row, would scream at the top of her lungs, to which the girls would respond, "STOP SAM!" This in turn, made her do it louder and longer. Mid-scream, I turned around to try and distract Samantha with something and I see she has a huge smile on her face while screaming at the top of her lungs. She gets exactly the type of reaction she's hoping for.

Due to some scheduling conflicts, we celebrated her birthday on Monday, a day late. She had a pretty good idea something special was going on, she just had no idea what.

Her Grandma and Grandpa Munk and great-Grandma Spring came and joined us for dinner and birthday festivities.

Because of her love of bananas, I made her a banana cake with cream cheese frosting, which she devoured in a second.

And this little introduction to sugar did it's job--she was bouncing off the walls, bopping to the music on her new Winnie the Pooh rider.

We sure do love you, Samantha!