Sam the spiderman

This is Lara's illustraion of Sam in his spiderman outfit.
Some days Sam lives in his spiderman outfit!

Spiderman birthday

Sam is really into superheroes at the moment, Spiderman is his favorite. For his 3rd birthday in early August, Sam got another Spiderman outfit, and superhero books among other things. Naturally I got him a spiderman birthday cake. I also made "web" cupcakes so he could share them with his friends in daycare. The week before his birthday, Sam was invited to a party in Chipmunks playcentre. He started asking for a party for his birthday after that, probably jsut realised you could invite "friends" to your party! We got away with just a family meal this year.

We still read spiderman, ironman and the incredible hulk stories most nights. But we had to buy kids-friendly Spiderman dvds, the adult ones (I just realised they are 15+ when the kids started to have nightmares) are simply too scary. Just the other day Sam came home with the daycare's spare spiderman undies (he had an accident). He pulled his pants down to show everyone his undies, and refused to take it off before his bath because he simply wanted to "hold it a little longer". Looks like the superheroes will stay in our house for awhile.

Soccer photo day

Sam started little kickers (kids soccer program) in mid April, after being on the waiting list for a couple of months. For 45 minutes on Friday mornings, Sam gets to do various ball games and I get to sit down and rest for a bit.
He seems to enjoy it.

Line up to kick


Look at my stamps!

Ballerina

Cheeky monkey

Sam is quite a handful at the moment. He is quicker and cheekier than Lara was at the same age. He doesn't listen as well and changllenges 'authority' more (seond child +  boy?). He has chucked toys in the toilet, put his hands in the toilet. He got out of his pram and ran to the jumping castle (not free) and didn't want to get out in our last shopping excursion. I took him to an indoor playground once, he went straight to the 5-11 year-old section (2-5 yo section is too boring for him) and stayed there for the entire 2 hours. He thinks he's older than Lara, often shouted 'instructions' for Lara to do. He likes to open and close lids, doors, windows. He also like to chuck things into illegal' places, like back of couch, toilet, out of the window, into small holes.

This is me trying to take a video of the kids while we were picnicing at the local park.



Sam is being toilet-trained at the moment (3rd week). He's doing very well with wee, but only started to poo in the potty. I am busy washing dirty undies, shorts and shoes!

Sam's birthday

Sam didn't eat any dinner and had a sudden temperature on Thursday night, two and a half days before his birthday. I took him to see a doctor on Friday and he had the first dose of antibiotics by lunch time that day. However, Sam still got worse overnight, vomited many times between 1-5 am on Sat morning. We would cancel the family birthday dinner on Sunday if he hadn't shown signs of improvement. Sam asked for bread and started to eat on Saturday night, and by Sunday was full of beans again. It was a tiring weekend for the adults, having to look after a sick child and prepare dinner for everyone. It was my birthday the following day, all I wanted to was to have a good nap!

Sam playing with new toys on his birthday. He received several Thomas presents, he is a Thomas fan!


I had learned from past birthdays that there was no point trying to do too much and made myself too tired. There is always another birthday coming. I decided to outsource the cake this year and made the family dinner as simple as I could. There was no time to make another dessert either but the white chocolate mud cake (it weighted a ton!) was enough really. There was plenty of food left without me making more varieties.
Lara and Sam loved the ballons and enjoyed playing with their cousins.
Happy 2nd birthday my little boy!

[23 months] Talkative

Sam knows many words and talks all the time.

You have to decode what he says though. "Nanni" is 'Iin the night garden', his favourite program and "Nonni" is 'Thomas'. "Ta-tu" is thank you and "You-ee" is lolly. He was introduced to lolly during the long car ride this holiday and every 2 minutes, we heard 'you-ee?' coming from the back seat. He also asked 'why' when we asked him to do things, no doubt getting this from Lara. He is great at passing things to Lara and like all kids, will choose the biggest food item while passing the smaller potion to Lara. In the morning when I tell Lara to 'get ready to go' if we are going somewhere, and if Lara is not 'getting ready', Sam would go up to Lara and shouted 'weedy to doe wa wa'. In fact, he really like to shout 'instructions' to Lara. (probably copying me...) He calls himself 'Nam' and like any two-year-old, he likes to do things himself 'Nam do it' he says.

Sam likes to sing 'ee-i-ee-i-o' in 'Old MacDonald had a farm' and he does all the animal noises at the right place. He dances every time the volin music is on. He also knows the tune to 'twinkle', 'lightly row' and some other violin songs and humming every time the CD is on or Lara is playing. We don't let him touch Lara's violin in case he breaks it, but I'm thinking of making a 'box violin' using a ruler and a tissue box for him later. This is him playing violin with a friend's daughter's violin (a cheap one she bought overseas as a toy for her daughter)

Some pictures of Sam

Some photos of Sam, the first few in his family daycare.

Sam reading to little boy Jacob.
Sam loves to read. He frequently brings a book to us so we can read to him. He likes the 'In the night garden' book, 'Spot' books and his Masiy cloth book. Sam's not very careful with his books, h ripped books apart and threw them about.


Sam enjoying a cup of babyccino.
He loves to drink our tea too. Sam loves Indian food! He can eat very spicy curries!





Sam playing with toys.
He loves cars and balls. And trains too. He says 'all on board' (in his own way) every time he sees a train. Did I mention he talks all the time now?



Sam fascinated by Lara's face-parinting in school's 'family fun day'.
We have been to a couple of fairs recently. Both Lara and Sam enjoyed being out in the beautiful winter sun, patting the animals and the play facility. The most recent one we went to was 'Festival on the Green' in St Ives. We paid for Sam to go on a $5 jumping castle and he wanted to get out in 10 seconds....

Eczema and vegetarian cookbook

Sam has eczema since he was a newborn, on and off, sometimes not so good but mostly managable. It got worse when he was around 6-7 months. He had red patches all over his arms and legs but none under his nappy. Doctor suggested we change laundry powder. A acquaintance at daycare told me her specialist recommended pure soap as her son had bad eczema too. I switched to pure soap for Sam's clothes, but we still use normal detergent for ours(omo sensetive). It probably helped Sam's skin somewhat, well enough for us to forget about it for a while until it started again at the end of last year. The eczema was the worst ever, it was not on and off, it was ON all the time! Sam would scratch his skin, it bled and healed and you could see little red blood marks everywhere. The itch would made him awake at night(otherwise he always sleeps through) and made him irritable during the day. Doctor prescribed cortisone cream (elocon) and said eczema is a chronic disease we need to manage. Sam was only 18 months old and my lovely baby boy, for his sake I need to believe I can find a solution for his eczema. Anyway I started doing research on the internet and looking at alternative medicines. We took Sam to see a Chinese doctor for herbal cream and he had acupuncture. I was also looking at naturopaths.

It was during that time that I came across this website : Eczema - One family's solution . As soon as I saw it, I remembered we had changed back to detergent for Sam's clothes at around the time his eczema got worse. I was very moved by this Mum's determination to fix her son's eczema and I realised detergent exposure was probably the main reason Sam's eczema got worse. I can relate to the "water in bucket" analogy of allergy on the website - Sam's bucket was full (he had a lot more exposture to detergent) and that made him susceptible to allergens that he could usually tolerate, like grass. Now we only use pure soap to wash clothes for the whole family, we also switched to a detergent-free dishwashing liquid. I'm watchful for anything that has SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) or similar. Food was another big contributor to Sam's eczema problem.

A book I read recommend eating only veges and brown rice for two weeks then slowly introduce food to determine the 'culprit'. It sounded like a good idea but very hard to implement. Sam is in daycare 4 days a week. It is very hard to control his food intake during those days, it's even harder for me to cook tasty food with only vegetables. I know I need to learn to cook more tasty vegetarian food so I bought a new cookbook "River cottage veg everyday" to help me. Every dish in this book looks so yummy and I want to make every dish in this book! So far, I made beetroot and walnut hummus (page 300), oven-dried tomatoes (page 304), pistachio dukka (page 294), roasted pasnip chips (page 357) and Tahini-dressed courgette and green bean salad (page 74). I will be making more even when Simon and the kids don't share my enthusiasm unfortunately...

Perfect ears

Sam had his ear check-up again this afternoon. We were only in the specialist's office for about 5 minutes. After Dr looked into both ears, he confirmed they are now perfectly normal and healthy. It was worth the one hundred dollar fee just to hear these words. The troubles we took to both work part time so Sam could stay out of daycare was the right thing to do. Now the test will be to see if his ears can self-drain next winter (the cold season).

After we left the doctor's office, we bumped into a ukelele group playing outside. Lara insisted we stay and watch. With good news in mind, the afternoon breeze, and some live festive music, it was a good Friday afternoon to end the week.

Now Sam does not have any execuse to not listen to me!

Siblings bath time 16-Oct-11

For a little while, Sam cried every time he went into a bath. I suspected he had a little nappy rash that stung once and that put him off bath for qutie some time. Now he really enjoys having a bath with Lara and Lara loves bathing with Sam. They still fight and sometimes the bath ended in both crying but generally they play well together.

Ear trouble

I postponed and cancelled Sam's specialist appointments twice because he seemed to be fine after stopping daycare. Once or twice though, I thought I smelt something sweet coming from his ears. To make myself at ease and think maybe we should try daycare again, I decided to keep this Wednesday's appointment. Am I glad that I did.

Wednesday was a busy day - I enrolled Lara at the 'big school' in the morning and I had to work that night (from 9pm for 4-5 hours). The appointment didn't worry me as I thought it would be a walk-in-walk-out, confirm-everything's-fine sort of thing, but I was totally wrong.

Firstly, the appointment was not made at the best time - it was booked 3 months ago at a time I thought Sam would most likely to be up, but 2pm now fell in the middle of Sam's only day sleep. Secondly, my plan of letting Sam have a short sleep in the pram beforehand didn't work, so he was very tired at 2pm. Then the doctor was running late, so Sam was over-tired by the time we saw the doctor at 2.45pm (so was Lara after she played 'jump from the cushions' in the playroom with her friend who happened to be seeing another doctor at the same surgery). I was tired too from stopping Sam break anything in the surgery, sucking on door stops, opening drawers and bumping his head on glass doors that I was very glad when Sam's name was called. I went through the motions of explaning Sam's past recurrent ear infections and how he was fine after no daycare for nearly 3 months and answered routine questions "Do you have any conecerns about his hearing?" "No" "Does he sleep alright at night?" "Yes he sleeps through every night" and so on. So I was shocked when the doctor told me Sam has glue ear, and that he probably can't hear me very well!

The short story is Sam is on bactrim (antibiotics) and Prednefrin Forte eye drops (on Sam's nose as it has the same ingredient as the nose drop without the sting) for a month then we will see if the condition improves. If not then surgery might be required (ie grommets). The 'glue' in his ear needs to be cleared or drained so it doesn't hinder his speech ability in the future.

I've been reading information about glue ear apparently it's very common, 1 in 3 Australian primary aged kids have it. The risk factors are : being with lots of kids (tick when Sam was in daycare), allergy (tick, Sam has eczema, quite bad sometimes) and being a boy (tick). Luckily Sam doesn't seem to be bothered by his glue ear so far and is generally very active and happy. Hope his condition improves in the next few weeks.

Sam is one!

I remembered vividly the day I went into hospital to be induced and how fast everything happened at the end. I still remembered holding Sam straight after his brith, feeling his naked, sticky bottom and thinking how bony it felt (compared to Lara's). I also remembered falling asleep with him lying on top of me the day after. Now Samuel's walking and babbling and a whopping 11 kg! We had a small family birthday celebration for him the Sunday before his birthday. Lara helped me decorate his birhday cupcakes.

Sam learned to shake his head in response to a question. He would wait for me to finish the question, he would pause for a minute as if he was thinking, then he would shake his head like crazy. Sometimes he shook his head so hard that he fell over. It was hilirious to watch. The more we laughted, the more Same did it.

Sam wants to be in the midst of everything. Mum and I were pointing to a crochet block and discussing the colours. What did Samuel do? He walked over and pointed to the block and started "babbling". He also likes to watch 'Ninja Warrior' and 'Unbeatable benzuki' (SBS from around 7:30pm on Sunday) with Lara and us. He clapped and made all the right nosies when we did.

Sam was fored to stand in a corner for the first time the other night because he would not stop hitting Lara! We joked that we should have a corner reservered for him becuase at this stage it looks like he'll be spending a lot of time there!

Sam loves his food and always wants to try our food. Typical meals in a day for him would be :weetbix with fruit in the morning, bread with vegemite and avocardo for lunch, rice (congee) with veges or meat/fish for dinner. He also has what we have sometimes. He still has 3 formula feeds a day. More and more, Sam only has one sleep in the middle of the day, usually from around 12:30pm to 3pm.

Sam started showing stranger/separate anxiety. He's weary of people he didn't know well and took some time to get used to Mum. Sam loves his Grand-dad the best.

More kids pictures

Lara and Sam have been getting along well. They still fight for toys (whatever toys Lara's playing with, Sam wants the same one too), and have small accidents (like the time Lara fell on Sam, or Sam hitting Lara or pulling her hair) but I think they enjoy each other's company. Lara is quite protective of Sam and is as gentle with him as a four-year-old can be and Sam's eyes light up when Lara is around.







These photos always bring a smile to my face, sometimes tears to my eyes and most definitely light up my life.

What is Samuel up to?

Yum char

We had a yummy yum char lunch on Friday after Lara's ballet. We timed the outing according to Sam's sleep routine and didn't have to wait long for food. We ordered 8 dishes, incuding a plate of soy chicken, a plate of white bait and other dumpling dishes. Lara didn't stop eating during the meal and Sam sat throught the whole meal and ate more food than any 10-month old I know! We really enjoyed this simple outing after some stressful time ealier this month.

We made a swift decision at the beginning of June to take Sam away from daycare. Sam's now on his 6th course of antibiotics and has another cold. I worry about his recurrent ear infection and wanted time for his ears to recover. The decision was made quickly but not lightly. We didn't know what the consequences of this decision meant. And for the 48 hours afterwards, unexpected events made things even more uncertain for us. Now we know Simon and I will both work part time for the next couple of months so we can look after Sam between us. We will find out if this arrangement works and see how things pen out after that.

Sam sucking on a deep-fried white bait @ yum char and Lara looking very pleased with a full tummy!

[9 months] Sick explorer

Sam is 10 kg @ 9 months old. With him moving around so much, his weight has not increased much in the last few weeks. Sam can now hold onto a chair and walk around the room, he can even turn and move around furniture. Samuel is a climber. He would climb onto the box we put in front of tv to prevent him from opening drawers and cupboards. Sam is a explorer, he squeezes himself into tight spaces and makes a run for the kitchen if the safty gate is left open. Sam loves cables (power cables and telephone cables), doors, wheels and power switches. Lara was never interested in such things, how does Sam know he is a boy?



Sam loves his food. He has tried chicken, pork, fish, eggs and most fruit and vegetables. I switched to a lactose-free (Karicare delact) formula 2 months ago when Sam had running nappies (due to teething) and he's still on that. Sam's two bottom teeth had given us a lot of problem. It looks like more teeth coming on the top. Sam is more clingy and ratty and has red cheeks when he's teething. Teething combined with cold and ear infection in the last few weeks had made Sam a not very happy boy.

When Sam is well, he's very affectionate, loves to give me cuddles and kisses, open-mouth-tounge-saliva-very-wet sort of kisses. He giggles a lot too. A couple of little girls in daycare really like Sam. They called out "Sam Sam Sam" and came and touched his face and showered him toys when they saw him.

Sam's first swing ride at our local park. He was not very sure about it. He didn't cry, but held onto the swing a little too tightly and looked very serious.


Sam's first corn on the cob,he had a good go at it.


Other notable things:
*Sam can't lie still when you change his nappy, he put his hands down there or try to turn around or get up. Every nappy change is a stuggle.
* Sam got hold of the real remote control (he's just not interested in the 'not-working' ones we gave hime to play) the other day and knew to point it at the TV.
* Sam likes to rip the pages off our yellow/white pages and eat it.
* Sam does not want to sit in the bath, he wants to get up and walk around the bath tub.

[7 months] Crawling, daycare and others

Sam crawled forward 2 days before he was 7 months old (I knew this because I sent Simon an email about it). It was a slow, two-or-three-steps-then-rest sort of crawl, but within a week, Sam could crawl almost as fast as I walked (slowly). Sam is now very good at going back and forth over the step between our lounge and family room and he is trying to stand too! This is how Sam climb over the step- he raises his bottom up in the air, moves his hands and wriggles his bum to go over the step. Samuel spent a lot of time at the step every day!




Samuel knows to wave when you wave at him. He stares at people he doesn't know, really stares. He gets very vocal when he's tired or bored. He doesn't cry very often, but when he cries (usually when he bump his head most recently), lots of big tears rolling down his cheeks. He was crying quite hard in the pram the other day (I was at the Medicare office), that Mother-in-law told me that his ears were filled with tears!

Samuel babbles and tries to say words sometimes. He loves Zebadee(I don't think the reverse is true). He is very inquistive and loves to play balls. He push the ball with his hand then crawls to where the ball is and do that again and again. Like all babies, he's very interested in the things he can't have, like remote control, camera, watches etc. Sam had his first full day at daycare two weeks ago. He's doing one day a week and seemed to be doing very well. He slept for nearly two hours last week but was usually exhausted by the time he came home.



Sam was 9.7 kg on 15th of March (about 7.5 months old). No wonder my back aches sometimes.

Sam and Zeb

Sam is fascinated by Zeb. Especially now that Sam is crawling around (quite fast), he won't leave Zeb alone. Zebadee is really very tolerant of Sam.

Siblings love 04-02-2011