Sam The Logician

It is amazing to me to see how Sam's mind is growing. He's never been slow; all the silly little tricks that are supposed to work on babies never worked on him (to my great dismay). He's starting to grasp surprisingly subtle things now, and while he's not cleverer than I am -- yet -- it never fails to amuse me when I see where he's going with things.

Example:

We were at Brad's house where he was putting the finishing touches on a gingerbread house. He decided that he wanted to eat the candy he was decorating with, and when I said no, he pleaded (of course) for one more.

"What do I get out of it?" I asked. He gave me a candy to eat too -- though not without trying to trade my fresh candy for his slightly used one. I thought it was clever enough on his part that I took the deal.

A few minutes later, he offered me another candy, this time out of the blue. As I was reaching for it, I noticed that the candy he'd snagged for himself -- because if I was eating one, he was allowed to, too -- was already most of the way into his mouth.

Example 2:

He's been on a hitting kick (ha!) lately. Julie and I have been trying very hard to drive home that this is unacceptable, but we're not sure if the message is really getting through. It's been particularly hard because Joey, at 6 months, pretty much flails randomly, resulting in frequent baby punches and kicks. Joey doesn't get in trouble, though. We've explained that this is because he's a baby.

Sam has decided in the past week or so that he is also a baby - probably due entirely to the fact that Joey gets his soother all day, whereas Sam is restricted to when he's sleeping. Today while I was getting Sam into his snow pants, he started punching me in the arm.

"Why are you hitting me?" I asked.

"It's ok if I hit you because I'm a little baby," came the reply.

Clever boy.