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So it is June 12th, and that means only five days until Samantha's first birthday. I have gone against all my better judgement and decided to have a party here at our house. I will be inviting some foreign friends and local friends so it will probably be quite the mix of languages, cultures, and assumptions about what exactly a birthday party is, but it should be fun. That is, apart from the fact that samantha is smack-dab in the middle of a seriously strong bout of seperation anxiety. If I leave the room, her world falls apart. It's crazy, I tell you. I'm sure it will pass, like every other phase I have worried through so far, but still...

So anyway, more about samantha since her birthday is almost here. One little known fact about her is that she is quite the scavenger. When she is tired of sitting in her high chair, she will make it so very obvious that she is ready to be out (ie, screaming and throwing her food). Out she goes, toddles over to her room to play with toys...only to return in a matter of seconds. Her little head brushes under the dining room table as she heads back to her high chair - to pick up all the leftover food bits that have fallen to the ground in the previously mentioned chicken discus event. She usually is very fortunate to find no small amount of food particles on the ground, to her great delight. She is samantha the scavenger.

One of our mosty enjoyable new mantha-tricks is like this: I (or josh, or emma) will sit on this little step in our living room and we will open our arms wide and say, "Samantha, can you give (mommy,daddy, emma) a hug?" and, patter-patter-patter, she will run from wherever she is with a bright grin on her face and collapse into our arms and nestle her head in that perfect spot by your neck. It's a great little trick that I welcome you all to come and experience!

Samantha's word count is about as high as her tooth count: 2. But she's got four on the way - and this could be applicable to teeth or words! We're still holding strong at two bottom teeth, but the top four are threatening to break through at any moment. Where words are concerned, she does mama, daddy, and hi really well. "Emma" sounds like "mama", but we know she's talking about emma because she looks at emma. She can also say "eeeeeeeeeeat!" and "all done", but that one sounds more like "aah dah". I think there's a few more that we understand, but maybe there's a bit too much parental bias in there to classify them as words yet. She also has quite the collection of gobbelty-gook phrases that sound like a mysterious and foreign language that has yet to be recorded, and we just smile and say, "oh really?".

Samantha loves to play with emma, loves to laugh when emma laughs, and increasingly likes books. Realize, I didn't say likes being read to because that's about equal to being tortured, but she likes books. She'll totter over to the shelf, carefully select one (with all the accompanying grunts it takes for her to get a book that is wedged on the shelf off!) and then tuck it under her arm while she goes about her other afternoon activities, like scrounging under the table, or checking out the bathroom, a very annoying habit of hers.

Her bright blue eyes shine and sparkle and make you wonder what she must be thinking in her head to have such happiness bubbling out - and then when she laughs, her eyes crinkle down and she cocks her head to the side and then you know for sure whatever it was she was thinking was certainly mischevious. She loves putting crayons in her mouth and then then abruptly putting them down as soon as she thinks you're watching her. She screams when she's happy and upset (that's one phase I thought would pass long ago!) She sways so heavily to any music that is playing you swear she'll lose her balance and fall over, but somehow she always manages to stay up and keep swaying. Her recent favorite has been "Twist and Shout" and hey, with all that twisting going on, what's not to love about that?

Anyway, even with all her recent separation craziness, it is with so much happiness that we celebrate her first birthday and remember that day when she joined our family.

Yes, that day that was June 17th. That day that was our anniversary. And with all the hubbub of planning her birthday, we just yesterday realized, "oh yeah, our anniversary is here too!" We both admitted we've just got so many other things we're thinking about, and then planning stuff for her birthday just makes our anniversary seem like an afterthought.

But, of course, anniversaries are not afterthoughts! Anniversaries - and friday nights, and scrabble games, and cooking nights in the kitchen together, and bedtime chats, and long walks in the park - are those special times when relationships are celebrated and protected. But in all fairness, it's just going to be impossible to celebrate samantha's birthday and our anniversary on the same day for the next 80 years (I'm giving myself a long life span). So what should we do?

Should we arbitrarily choose another date on the calendar which will be the day we celebrate our anniversary? That's my only idea to be able to properly devote attention to both very special events. What are your ideas? If you are in favor of arbitrarily choosing a date, how about you submit a proposed date? Drop your comment in the suggestion box!!!

And in the meanwhile, think happy thoughts about samantha. Videos went out in the mail sunday, so hopefully one will make it your way or be passed around to you. I'm toying with the idea of posting it our blog, but I'm such a privacy freak I don't know if I'm quite willing to go that far yet, but we'll see...