All About Sam: Chapters 1–6

"He's only five hours old," the woman said. "So I haven't had time to conduct an exhaustive study. But in all honesty, Anastasia, I have to tell you that I think he will probably wet his diapers a whole lot."

Anastasia wailed, "He's been kidnapped! Someone climbed in the window and stole him! Look for a ransom note!"

Under the chair, Sam grinned. He had never caused such a commotion before, not even the night last week when his ear ached and he cried for a whole hour.

Strangers were something different. They spoke another language, apparently. Strangers sometimes leaned over his crib or his carriage and said things like "Ba-ba, boo-boo" or "kootchy kootchy," and none of that made any sense at all, so he just smiled politely or stared at them with a puzzled look.

He had some teeth now. Sometimes he bit his own finger by mistake and it hurt. He tried not to do that. He tried to bite other people's fingers.
And he bit toys. His teddy bear wasn't good biting, because it was too soft; but there was a hard plastic pretzel that he chewed on quite a bit. And the bars on the side of his crib were made of wood; he gnawed on them while they thought he was sleeping.

So he was practicing legs and feet. Using legs and feet, you could get yourself upright so that you looked like a real grown-up person. Once you were upright, like a grown-up, you never had to eat rug.

No one was paying any attention to Sam. He was sitting on the rug chewing on his plastic pretzel.
Very quietly — just as stealthily as Anastasia had painted her dad's toenail — Sam put his pretzel down.

He heard his mother call, "Look! Sam's walking!"
He heard Anastasia shriek, "He's talking, too!"
He heard his father bellow, "What — in the name of — what is this on my toenail?"

"Hi, Sam," she said. "Are you getting into mischief?"
"Nope," Sam said.

So Sam said "No" and gave the training pants back to his mother.
She looked exasperated. "Sam," she said, "don't you want to be toilet trained?"

Anastasia glared at him. "Traitor," she said.

Anastasia pried open the lid of a large cardboard box.

The third moving man appeared, looking puzzled, with a can of Pepsi in his hand. He stared at them for a moment. Then he shrugged, put the Pepsi down on the top step, and got himself a truck. He chose the big gray steam shovel. He made it say "Clankety-clank" as he drove it down the hall at the end of the procession.

"It's better than junior high, and it's better than Harvard university," Sam announced at dinner, "and it's the best school in the whole world, my school is. There is a slide like a giraffe, and there are a million books, and some of them have airplane pictures, and there are paints that you can moosh around, but you have to put on a smock first. And I'm going to have lots of new friends, and one of them is named Adam."

"And there's a big Mexican hat, called a somberro," Sam went on.
"Sombrero," his mother corrected.
"Right. Somberro. That's what I said. And my friend Adam put on the somberro—"
"Sombrero," his father said.