The Sam Update - Twenty Four Months, Part Two

I thought the 2 year update was significant enough to break it up into 2 posts.  First of all, here are the pictures!  I'm moving from Shutterfly to Picasa for viewing and it took me a few days to figure out how to make it work the way I want it to.

I mentioned in the last post that Sam has developed even stronger likes and dislikes.  We were surprised to find out that Sam likes strong flavors.  I thought toddlers were supposed to like bland food like bread and pasta and plain cheese pizza, but Sam is bored by those things.  She likes steak with Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning, Italian sausage, and pepperoni pizza.  She also loves pepper.  It must be the Afflerbach genes.  She wants pepper on everything and when she's done, she wipes up the leftover pepper on her plate with her sticky fingers and licks it all off.  Then she says "more."

She loves jewelry and buckles and dolls and pink, but does not like to wear a dress.

Her vocabulary has grown tremendously.  She is in a practice phase now where she likes to mimic words just to see if she can say them, even if she doesn't know what they mean.  Of course, she uses many words properly and her most common two-word-sentence is HELP, PLEASE.  Her first sign-language word was ALL-DONE and now she can finally say it out loud, which allows me to pay less attention to her while she eats.  Some other favorite words right now are AIRPLANE, LATKE, LOOFA, FRENCH FRY, and still number one, JINX.  Sometimes she still gets her syllables mixed up.  My favorite is when she tries to say BYE-BYE DADDY and it comes out DIE-DIE BADDY.

Sam had her first canoe ride a few weeks ago.  She hated the life-jacket but was fearless about the boat and the water.  I hope to get out on the canoe a few more times before it gets too cold.

For Sam's birthday, we continued our tradition of filling her room with helium balloons during the night so that she wakes up to them on her special day.  Her grandpa and grandma Mossoff came for Labor Day weekend so we celebrated a few days early.  We did a lot of small things - we went to the mall with a fountain that the kids can play in, we had a nice lunch, we grilled burgers and had cake and presents, we went to the park where we rode the carousel and the train and had a picnic lunch, we went to a party thrown by our development where they had a moon-bounce, cotton candy, bubbles and lots of kids.  It was low-key and there was plenty of time for the grandparents to hang out with Sam - just a perfect weekend.  It was very similar to her first birthday actually, except that Grandee and Grando Afflerbach were the grandparents at that one.  Maybe we'll be lucky enough to have all four of them at her next birthday.