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Alas, the downtime means I have pictures on my internal file server, they have not yet made it up into the now woefully out of date gallery.accapehart.com.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. Check it out.

The Go-Kart racing. That was fun, but I’m still sore. A bunch of Lindens went down to Burlingame, CA where we went to GoKart Racer Where you do the racing (I guess at other GoKart places, your mom does the racing?)

There were roughly 30 of us there for racing. The sign-in process wasn’t bad, but was a little slow as we all had to go through a process for which there are a few computers, and of course we arrived as a bunch.

It was with mixed emotions, (but mostly childlike-delight) that I got to watch the Blue Angels perform over the San Francisco bay near North Beach. The skill and training involved is amazing. The planes themselves are cool, and just seeing the turns they make, their proximity for some maneuvers, their separate coordination for others. It’s a sight to see.

So, we had quite an afternoon. We drove in (the traffic was maddening) and parked at Linden Lab which was close enough to walk to the Fisherman’s Wharf area from which we could get a pretty good view. The area was packed enough that walking further along, Carolyn couldn’t stand the crowds any more and we needed to head back into the main part of the city.

Oh boy, oh boy. I love the opportunities afforded us by living in a ‘real’ metropolitan area. This afternoon, a bunch of people from our company went Go-Kart racing. And this isn’t your little neighborhood go-kart track either.. this was racing. With track-jump-suits, helmets, neck braces, and whipping around corners. (Are you sure you don’t want to come work with us?!?) — More on this soon, but suffice it to say, I brought home a trophy!

MonsterFool has already blogged about Sam’s well-baby visit. But I wanted to include a couple of things that she didn’t.

1. The pediatrician gave Sam a book —Rainforest Colors. We were so uncertain that this was really the case, we had to ask at the nurses station on the way out to be sure. They grinned, and confirmed — every well baby visit from 12-months on, you get a book when you go to the doctor’s.

So far, I’m really impressed with Kaiser Permanente. Whether this plays out this way in the end or not, it feels like the doctor gets to decide what she thinks is best for Sam. We consult, she scribbles on a piece of paper, and it’s done. They didn’t have the infant flu shot in stock yet. We can come back later to get it. We can just show up. It was suggested we call … not to schedule another appointment, just to make sure that the infant flu shot is in. It feels so different from nearly every other medical practice I’ve been in. It feels more relaxed that the medical staff feels like they get the freedom to do what they think is right for the patient.

It was a year ago now, that Samantha Fay Capehart came into the world. I’m amazed at all that’s happened in the past year — so many changes in our lives. I’ll try to wax poetic about them soon, but in the meanwhile, I wanted to wish you a

Happy Birthday, Samantha!

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.

I hesitate to say it for fear of jinxing it, but it looks like we’re back! This whole process took much longer than I wanted it to (as you might have guessed.) The following factors contributed:

• The machines spent a reasonable amount of time just coming across the country in the moving van

• It took AT&T longer than it should have to get us set up with DSL in our house (especially given the previous resident had DSL set up, and we took over her line, right down to the telephone number!)

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. It’s the well-deserved sleep of the crawler.

I’m back in PA with my family. So nice to see them. It drives home my impatience for the resolution of this whole transition though.

I’m not quite back to my former status with Sam, but I was clearly no stranger either.

The things that struck me most about her after having been gone for almost 2 months:

• Larger: Project Fatbaby has been largely successful.

• More alert: Actually attentive to things rather than just responsive to stimuli