AC Capehart capehart

Dear Samantha, Tomorrow you will turn 16 months old. Back in Pennsylvania, a little groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil will stick his little brown nose out of his hole-in-the-dirt house and venture out into the air. Hundreds of people will watch to see if he sees his shadow. If he does, folklore has it that there will be six more weeks of winter. If not, there will be an early spring. I was saying to your Dad the other day that I doubt people in the San Francisco Bay area pay much attention to Groundhog Day.

Dear Sam, Today you turn 13 months old, which means we have completed the first month of your second year of life. This means that for the past month, we’ve been saying things like “Oh, remember this time last year…?” This time last year you were too small for the Halloween costume we had for you (a black cat), we barely noticed the change back to Standard Time, I was still getting the hang of feeding you, and Daddy and I spent the better part of the days in pajamas.

No, this is not about some new software from Valve. Instead today is momentous for a different kind of half life. It was Halloween in 1988 that Carolyn and I started dating. For those of you not doing the math, that was 18 years ago. For those of you continuing to not do the math, or that don’t know us that well, we were 18 at the time. Carolyn and I have been some form of romantic partners to each other for half our lives (at least at the year-granular level… I’m not going to write a script like my friend to do the to-the-minute calculation.

Dear Sam, Do you hear that noise? That’s your parents laughing and crying and jumping up and down because you turned ONE YEAR old, which means we MADE IT! We survived the first year, and here you are laughing, smiling, talking, and nearly walking. One full orbit around the sun and our newborn blob has become a little person with opinions and personality. Dad and I feel like we can finally breathe after 365 days of worry.

My wife and I have been taking pictures of Sam pretty much whenever she and the camera are in the same room. Alas, the downtime means I have pictures on my internal file server, they have not yet made it up into the now woefully out of date gallery.accapehart.com. My little camera can also take short movies (as you might have seen with the blue angels post). Carolyn will be posting some of these in a new category she calls “Channel Sam” and the first of these is up now.

Dear Sam, I’ve been writing this letter to you in mind for weeks now, but until now I haven’t managed to spill the words onto a page. I hope you’ll cut me a little slack, because, you know, in addition to everything else going on during your 11th month, there was the little matter of that CROSS-COUNTRY move. Oh yes. You began this month in Altoona, PA and ended it in El Cerrito, CA.

Dear Sam, I’m writing this to you in your Uncle John’s old room at Gradyville, PA. You are asleep in my old room, clutching a toy car and set of plastic keys. The knees of your purple pants are filthy, your feet are covered in carpet fuzz and cat fur, and your round little tummy rises and falls rhythmically, straining against the straps of the car seat you fell asleep in.

There was a time when it was perfectly normal to set an alarm to wake Sam up to feed between 2 and 3AM. At the time, those days seemed eternal, stretching out for miles. The notion of sleeping through the night too dim to even imagine in the distance. And then, of course, things changed. Now I am all too happy to forget that old routine. Here’s our current routine at Mom-mom and Granddaddy’s:

This morning on the floor of the offices of Fay Real Estate, Sam executed her first forward crawl on hands and knees. She was going after one of Camus’s catnip toys. Camus and I are very afraid…

Dear Sam, I have big shoes to fill (you can take that figuratively or literally, as you like, because yes, your daddy has big feet). Since your daddy spent this past month in California, it is up to me to provide the chronicle of your ninth month. Nine months! Good lord, child, you’ve now been out for as long as you were in. How did that happen? When I look at your impish smile and the light tripping in your eyes I can barely recall the tiny, sleepy newborn Sam that used to fit along the length of my arm from elbow to palm.