Flanagan Clan

Happy brothers!

Take a look at these pictures. The first two were taken in 1982 of my brother, Jonathan. The last one was taken last week of Samuel. They look so similar to me, that if it wasn’t for the baby clothes, I could mistake Jonny for Sammy!

(Sorry the picture of Sammy isn’t that great… we don’t have a lot of pictures of him with his eyes open. He sleeps so much, and when he is alert we spend all our time enjoying him that we hardly even think to bring out the camera!!!)

The past several weeks have been quite busy as our family continues to adjust to life with Samuel. This past week I finally lost having Rachel, who was staying with me and helping out, and now I’m really on my own with the baby. Reality has struck: the house is never going to be clean again, and I’m going to have even less time to myself than when it was just Patrick. Samuel is very different from Patrick. Patrick was content to spend time alone in his swing for hours, while Sammy demands much more personal time. He will cry and cry if you leave him alone in his crib, bassinet or swing, but the instant you hold him he’ll stop crying and be perfectly content, that is, unless he is hungry. He is also much stronger than Patrick was at this age, and at 5 weeks, we’ve already had him rolling over several times.

Patrick is still rather indifferent to and uninterested in the baby. He seems to know who Sammy is, but he’s much more interested in chasing after balls. Occasionally, he will peep into Sammy’s bassinet if he’s crying, and he gets VERY interested in Sammy if Sammy is wearing an outfit that has balls on it. Sometimes he wants to help hold Sammy’s bottle, and if he gets a hold of any pacifiers, he’ll immediately put them in his mouth and I have to sterilize them all over again!

Here are a few pictures from the past several weeks.

Samuel just loves to be held

Samuel getting ready to be baptised

Our whole family!

Samuel was baptised on my dad’s birthday. This was taken afterwards, during lunch at my parents’ house.

Patrick watching over us at Oma’s house

Patrick helping Auntie Rachel feed Sammy

We have several pictures taken during the baptism, however I need to scan them in. Also, I think my dad or Rachel might have some digital pictures, which I need to steal from them!

One last thing to note: Most of the major events in Sammy’s life have been birthday presents for someone in my family. We found out we were pregnant with him on my birthday, he was born on Diane’s birthday, and now he was baptised on my dad’s. In addition, we had an ultrasound a few days before Christmas, when I was 6 weeks pregnant, and saw a first glimpse of his little heart beating on the screen. His first picture hung as the “angel” on our Christmas tree. He definitely is a little gift from God.

Sometimes while I’m busy cleaning the house or taking care of Sammy, I let Patrick watch PBS, which has a lot of good learning shows for kids, like Seasame Street and Mr. Rogers. Well, there is one show that comes on every day called Maya and Miguel, about a Latino brother and sister combo who get into lots of trouble but manage to learn inportant lessons along the way. The other day Patrick was watching it while I was feeding the baby, and a new episode that I hadn’t seen before came on. In the episode, Maya and Miguel, along with their rolly-polly grandma, little cousin and annoying parrot were at a carnival and competing against another family in a big family competition. The other family consisted of four tall blond haired boys and a very mean looking rottweiler. These boys were mean and spent most of their time taunting Maya and Miguel. And their last name was Flanagan!!!!

Of course, the Flanagans lose the competition, and somehow a lesson is learned, although I didn’t watch the show close enough to figure out what it was suppose to teach. The only thing I got out of it was that Flanagans are bad. We might just want to boycott Maya and Miguel!