A Day in the Life of Sammie

Remember when you guys asked for this, like, 6 months ago? Well, your wish is my command - and my apologies for the lateness! But here it is, a day in the life of Sammie.

Sammie usually sleeps under the covers in between her mom and dad. When we wake up and get out of bed, she stays under the covers and somehow is able to wrap them all around her so that you have no idea she's even under there.

Then she slowly peeks her head out from under the covers and waits for a while until she decides she's ready to get up...

See, here she is!

Because Dan doesn't have class until 9:30, he usually goes into the office and reads his email and Bible for a while after he wakes up. Sammie has her own special chair that she sits in while he does this.

Then she goes to the kitchen for a few hours while we're at work and/or school. When we get back, Sammie goes right to the couch and stretches out...she sure was cramped being forced to stay in the kitchen all day!

If she gets cold, she wraps herself up in a blanket. Dan guessed that Sammie spends approximately 50% of her time curled up in blankets.

The other 50%? Somehow squished in a small space as close as possible to her mommy or daddy.

If we go upstairs to the office to do homework or check email, Sammie comes up too. She likes to keep watch over the neighborhood while we're working.

Of course, if you try to sit in her chair and do your studying, she'll be sure to let you know that it's her domain.

If it's a weeknight, Sammie then gets to eat dinner, go on a walk, and then snuggle some more with her daddy.

If it's a weekend night, however, she goes out on the town! Sometimes she gets to play her favorite card game, Euchre.

And then it's back to bed and the whole cycle starts over again...I know, she has a hard life. :)

Best Birthday Present EVER

Sammie turned two last week. Yep....you missed it! Again, for the second year in a row, she got no presents from any extended friends or family.

Except one.

Oh, and was it an amazing present.

Dad and Diane picked out something special for the Saminator.

And technically they didn't even know it was her birthday, they just thought it was cute, but that's okay too, because we saved it and gave it to her on her birthday.

Are you ready for this?

She got A SNUGGIE!!

And now it's keeping her nice and warm here in...err...Texas. Well, it has been getting a little chilly at night!

And that's all for tonight...

Picnic at the Park!

On Saturday, we got together at Cameron Park with our friends from our small group at church. It was really hot - like 104 degrees hot - and after we'd been there for about 15 minutes, we were all wondering why we'd decided to get together outdoors. But after we got used to the heat, we had a great time. We went hiking, played with dogs, and cooked a yummy lunch on the grill.

Here are all the girls:

And all the guys:

Here's Dan with little Kennedy on his shoulders. She told me she was playing a game with him where she covered his eyes. I'm not sure how much Dan enjoyed that game.

But apparently it looked fun to other little girls, and soon Dan was the hit of the party with the kids!We were sooo tired after spending about four hours outside in the heat. Here's Dan driving home...you can tell we are about to take a looooong nap!

And one more of Sammie, just for good measure!

The New Ralph Lauren Model

Just Another Pointless Sammie post?

or is this the post you've been anxiously waiting for all week? (Julie, don't lie....)

Either way, Sammie turned ONE on Saturday! She had a wonderful day even though she didn't receive a single birthday card or gift in the mail from any of her extended family or friends. (**ahem**)

(Just to be clear, I'm totally joking. I mean, she only cried for like...an hour at most.)

The day started out when Dan woke up and sang "Happy birthday" to her. Next, she got to go on a morning walk!

Then a lovely breakfast, consisting of...well, dog food, but she seemed to enjoy it.

The thing is, I really wanted to take Sammie to Dogtopia for her birthday. But, well, we never quite got around to it. All the other birthday festivities got in the way, I guess. But we are going to take her sometime, and when we do I will let you know because they have a webcam and you'll be able to watch her play all day online!

So for most of the afternoon she just napped on the couch. Oh, and we gave her a birthday present of a rope wrapped into a ball. She played with that for a long time.

That night, we went over to Matthew's house with several friends for dinner, wine, and the OSU game. The dinner was Stouffer's Lasagna (Dan's favorite, as you know) and then we sampled some of the wine that Dan and Matthew had liked from their wine class.

In case you're interested, here were our favorites:

Greg Norman Cabernet Merlot - everyone liked

Wolf Blass Yellow Label Cabernet Savignoun - Dan's favorite

DaVinci Chianti - my favorite

Anyway, back to the Samster. Three dogs came over to Matthew's to help celebrate her birthday. (Okay, actually two of them already live there, but whatever...details details). Sammie loved them and played all night! She was so exhausted she slept the whole car ride home.

We had one last treat for her before bed. We put our down comforter back on for the winter! It's finally getting cool enough where we can appreciate it (read: 60 degrees). Sammie was so excited.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz....

And there you have it, another post in the series of "Random and Pointless Posts about Sammie," dedicated to Julie.

My Attempt at Homework

I was really trying to study today....see my statistics book underneath the puppy? Every time I tried to read she would just crawl on top of it and plop down.

Sammers

A certain someone has decided that I post too much about Sammie here on this blog. Now normally, I would try to prove that person wrong. But seeing as she's my little sister, I would feel way too bad if I did something that mean. Of course, I would never want to do anything to make her feel silly, I will just go ahead and try to prove her... RIGHT!

So here is a completely unimportant and pointless video of Sammie and Dan playing... be sure to have your volume on so you can hear her talking...it's just so CUTE!!

Be on the lookout for more completely pointless Sammie posts coming up.

Daydreaming...

"Just thinking about how to create world peace...or maybe deciding who I want to be president..."

"Hey Mom, why are you bothering me by taking pictures? You're interrupting my deep thoughts!"

"All right, fine...I guess I'll just take a nap instead!"

Hurricane Ike

Apparently, we're supposed to get a lot of rain tomorrow. Apparently, lots of people are coming here to Waco to stay while their homes get all wet and blown away.

This is the first hurricane that's really affecting us. They rescheduled all the weekend football games, including the Baylor game, for yesterday and today. Most things this weekend have already been cancelled. Not that we're actually going to get a hurricane here in Waco, but I guess the amount of rain and the high winds will be enough to cause some flash flooding and stuff.

The saddest thing is that tomorrow is supposed to be "Puppy Plunge Day" at the Waco Waterpark. Sammie has been looking forward to it for weeks, and now it's not going to happen.

I'm so sad..Daddy was going to take me off the high dive!

Labor Day Weekend

This weekend, I:

- Got everything done on my to-do list, except for finishing my presentation, but that's okay because it's not due until Thursday. And it was an ambitious to-do list.

- Wore my CONTACTS for TWO WHOLE DAYS in a row!

-Baked pita bread, that actually came out just like regular bread (i.e. no pocket), but I sneakily sliced them down the middle with a knife and no one was the wiser, and we had delicious pita pockets every day for lunch.

- Wore white pants and white shoes for two and a half days in a row to celebrate the end of being allowed to wear them (I know my etiquette), until this had to be cut short because I spilled on my pants. [Insert absolutely no one being surprised here]

- Went to my favorite restaurant in Waco to celebrate my 8-monthiversary with my husband.

- Watched Youtube videos on Autism for almost three hours

-Updated the background on my blog. Thoughts? I'll change it back if you hate it.

"I don't wanna get up! It's so hard to get out of bed after a long weekend!"

Tomorrow is going to be such a rude awakening....

Zoe comes to visit!

We're watching Zoe, our friends Lisa and David's pug, for the next few days while they are in San Antonio. Sammie and Zoe are best friends - they're about the same size and both love to play and run around together. Our apartment sounds like there's a herd of elephants running around upstairs because they just race back and forth between the rooms. I tried to get a video of it, but every time I'd start the camera they would stop and stare at me. So, here are some pictures instead!


Here's Sammie, lounging on "her" recliner:

Here's Zoe!

Another one of the Samster - I couldn't resist :-)

Here they are together...

They don't leave each others' side. They just run around together and sniff everything all over the apartment.

They pretty much use Dan as a jungle gym:

And finally, this doesn't even show it that well, but Sammie's toys were strewn all over the floor within about five minutes of Zoe being here. Sammie loves to show Zoe all her toys and then they run around with them together.

We have Zoe until Tuesday, so we'll have to see what the damage is by then... :-)

Baby Pics

My friend Melanie fosters animals for the humane society, and back in October, she took in one of their dogs who was very pregnant. The dog gave birth about two days after living with Melanie to four adorable puppies.

The puppies look exactly like her, right? Well, Melanie ended up falling in love with Lizzie, the mom and decided to keep her. The light brown girl (second from right) is Sammie, and obviously we ended up keeping her! The best part is that my friend Lauren took her brother, Gus-gus, so they all still get to see each other pretty regularly.

Melanie just gave me the CD of their baby pictures, so here are a few of me with Sammie when she was two weeks old. We had no idea we would adopt her at the time - we didn't decide until she was about 6 weeks.



That's me holding Sammie, along with Dan and our friend Camden. Dan's holding Gus-gus although you can't really see it in the picture. Please ignore how gross I look in the next picture - I couldn't resist putting it on here because of how cute our puppy was.

I know...I'm sort of obsessed....

Playing with Pictures

Well, I lost my camera's battery charger...I've looked all over for it and can't find it. Dan even looked and can't find it, which means it's really lost. Dan can always find the things I lose, which happens about fifteen times a day. This is only the second time that I can remember that he's been unable to find something I lost. The first time was when I lost my keys and we both searched for them for over an hour...including covering all the apartment complex grass, asking our landlord, driving to my office to see if I left them there.... turns out they were in my purse the whole time. He was a little bitter about that, understandably I guess, but we're both perplexed with the camera charger. Where could it have gone? I always just use it right by my computer.

Anyway, I still want to learn how to put pictures in entries on this, so I guess I'll just practice with a few older ones.

This is a picture of us from Chicago, in summer 2006. This was obviously taken a while ago but turns out we don't take any pictures together except at formal events and since we live in Texas, we haven't really been to many together recently!

Here's Sammie! These are from last weekend, when Julie came and visited! Sammie fell in love with her immediately and would not stop bothering her the entire weekend. This included eating her hair, kissing her face, shoving her toys in her nose...you get the idea. She just went to the vet last week and is 7 months old and weighs 17 pounds! Here's a video of her when she was only 6 weeks and 4 pounds...

Okay, so hopefully these all worked. Happy Memorial Day everyone! We're not "celebrating" at all, although I think spending the day at home just hanging out sure feels like celebrating. I'm going to a movie with Lauren and Camden tonight, and Dan is getting ready to hand out final exams tomorrow to his 9th and 10th graders. 4 days left for him until school's out for the summer!