As summer fades into fall, or rather, hits it directly in the face, going from highs of 85 to 65 overnight, I wanted to do a little recap of our summer. What is it about summer that seems so magical? Is it because that was the only time we got to really live in our childhoods? Maybe. Even though we’ve continued to be “COVID Cautious,” looking back, I think our summer was still fun, especially for the two year old who doesn’t know what he’s missing. We didn’t take a vacation but that really aligns with our financial goals and was probably a good decision, covid or not. This was our last summer together, just me and Quinn during the week days, and I just kept feeling like I wanted us to have fun and be outside as much as possible. Quinn and I spent countless hours  playing with bubbles, play dough, paint, his water table, and multiple sensory bins (lentils with construction vehicles and popcorn kernels with farm animals are still two of his favorites). He helped with gardening and mowing, we went for bike rides (first with me in his bike trailer but then pushing him on his bike with a handle after I became pregnant and riding a bike made me nauseous), we made a fairy garden, and went swimming. We swam in our hot tub every morning, it seemed, for a few months and he visited the big pool at Lewis Wetzel for the first time this summer. He also went to his first Story Hour at the library. We went to the park many times and he even got his own “park” in the backyard (as he calls his swing set). We visited the zoo twice (where he saw a peacock, which must have cast a spell on him that causes him to randomly transform into one. See pic below), played in the rain pretty much every time it rained 🙄, and he got ice cream every chance he could talk Kiki into taking him while she watched him during the market 😂. He progressed from barely moving in a stop and go fashion on his scooter to whizzing down the incline on our carport and turning down into the driveway. He can peddle his tricycle and has started learning on his balance bike. He turned two, got to turn his car seat forward, endured lots of bad hair cuts (not my fault, he wouldn’t let me finish 🤦🏻‍♀️), learned all of his colors, and met and petted almost all of the animals on our street. If all of that doesn’t describe a successful summer, I don’t know what does 🙂. 

Bubbles

Gardening

Remember: Safety first when you’re mowing 😉

He went from riding it to making it do wheelies 🙄.

Swimming

Swimming

And more swimming

Story hour at the library

And another time

His backyard “park”

Bruce park with his cousins 

Oglebay Zoo

His peacock transformation 🤷🏻‍♀️. 

Playing in the rain

Ice cream with Kiki

Zooming on his scooter. Or Grogu, as he calls it. 

Woo hoo for two!

All gather around the treat giver! Steele, under Quinn’s right arm, peed on Quinn’s leg last week. It was totally Quinn’s fault and he thought it was hilarious 🙄. But now that Steele has claimed him as his, I guess it’s good we’re having another baby 🤷🏻‍♀️😉. 

It’s amazing how much he has grown in one season, not just physically, although I think that was about 2 inches in height because he couldn’t maneuver that balance bike at all back in May due to his legs being too short. His expressive language skills blossomed right around his birthday and now the things that he comes up and says astound me sometimes. He picks up words and phrases that we say to him and it cracks me up when he repeats them back to me. For example, I’ll tell him I’m going to go start a load of laundry and I’ll be right back. He has started telling me, “I’ll be back,” when he leaves the room 😂. I tell him things are, “all good now,” when he wants me to clean them off but he tries to turn that around and say, “all good now,” when I tell him to clean something, when they are definitely not all good. He’s getting so much better at cleaning up his toys though, and sometimes does it without being reminded. I’ve been in kind of a purge mode thinking about how another human is going to live here and with humans, especially little ones, come lots of things. Another thing is that it will be cold before we know it and playing outside will become less frequent, so I’ve been working on readying the basement play room for winter. We haven’t played down there in months so everything is very interesting to Quinn again right now. This is where he’s the best at cleaning up because almost everything down there with multiple parts is in a container that he can’t open himself. So the trade off for getting a new toy is picking up the previous one. That’s a pretty good strategy, if I do say so myself 😆. Quinn will tell himself, “Good job, Quinn,” when he finishes cleaning up 🥰. He also told Philip, “Good job mowing,” last week 😅. It’s nice to be appreciated. Philip has an office in the basement and that’s where he works. Sophie was down there with us the other day and Philip came out to go to the bathroom. He said hi to us and then told Quinn he had to go back to work. As he was closing the door, Sophie bolted for it, trying to go with him. Quinn said, “Sophie work” 😂. He also likes to say, “Quinn a funny guy,” which is pretty true. If you ask him how a sloth moves, he’ll say, “reallllllly slow.” He’s stuck on the Five Little Monkeys song and will just randomly say, “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” This is often followed by, “Mama sing it,” or “Dada sing it.” 

He has decided that he now needs to two binks to sleep with, one for his mouth and one for his hand. He woke me up one morning and said, “Other bink,” making me think he wanted me to find it. After sleepily searching for it for a few minutes, I finally said, “I don’t know where it is, Bud,” to which he replied, “Hand.” It was in his hand the whole time. Apparently he was just telling me about it 🙄. 

He loves to say, “Mama, come here,” alllllll day long. Today he told me, “Mama, come here. Naked on couch!” He was, indeed, naked on the couch 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️. If Philip isn’t working and he tells me to come and I say that I’m busy, he’ll switch to, “Dada come here!” That doesn’t always work though. He wanted something in the trash closet one day (typically a broom or his spray bottle that I give him to help “clean” with), and Philip was standing right there. He asked Q what he wanted and said he would get it. He said no, and continued to yell for me. When I finally came, he pushed Philip out of the way and told me what he wanted 😂. Dad is his preference for giving horse rides on his shoulders and playing hide and seek though. When he wants a horse ride, Philip tells him to turn around, but instead of turning 180, he does a complete circle 🤣. My favorite game that he likes to play with me is Nap. He wants me to lay on the couch in his room and pretend to nap with him. He gets up after a few seconds and then brings random toys to nap with me. If only I could actually nap while this is going on, it would be perfect 😉. He tried to convince Philip to be complicit in theft one day. They were playing downstairs and he told Philip he wanted a “pinecone” in the freezer. Thinking he was talking about the gigantic pinecone I had been painting outside that his mom brought home for me from out west, Philip told him that he couldn’t have it, it was “Mom’s pinecone.” Quinn said, “Steal mom’s pinecone!” 😂 Turns out he wanted a drumstick ice cream cone in the freezer. 

Quinn likes to say his middle and last names when someone asks who he is. I’m not sure what happened to his first name. After watching an episode of Blippi, where he plays with a doll named Damon, Quinn has now named his doll Damon and even says he is Damon Oliver Eagleson 🤣. He spent a few days taking Damon everywhere and even teaching him how to clean by using Damon’s hand to help clean up blocks and cans we had been stacking 😅. I think he’s going to be a great big brother.

Making Damon help clean up 😂

I got this chair out when I was sorting clothes in his closet so he took it to use for Damon. I hope now that Quinn knows all of his colors he may be able to tell me what color his hair is. The lighting in our house is atrocious so it looks very dark in this pic. Later that same day I took a photo and it looked so light, it was almost blonde 🙄. I can’t figure it out. 

He gives his lion horse rides, too 😉.

He’s going through a phase where he’s scared of snakes and he thinks everything is a snake—the cord to my hot glue gun, the water hose outside, the barbell in the basement. Every time he goes in the laundry room/gym, he tells me “snake,” and then “scared,” and then “touch it.” He touches it every time and I tell him he was brave to touch it even though he’s scared of it 🙂.

His love for animals got him his first really big boo boo as it lead him down some concrete steps, head first, trying to catch a cat 🤦🏻‍♀️. He cried for about 2.5 minutes and then was fine. He even said, “I okay” 😭😭. My heart took much longer to recover. I was standing right by him and went running down the steps after him. He got a big gash to his forehead and scraped up his nose. I’m hoping it doesn’t scar. Luckily, it didn’t bleed for very long and he didn’t need stitches. The ER is the last place I want to take him, well ever, but especially right now. 

I was trying to just take a pic of the tree but he came running over and said, “Cheese!” 😂

Quinn is our biggest ham but Sophie is our biggest attention seeker. As soon as Quinn goes to sleep, she thinks I belong to her. I was trying to finish up the last of the paperwork from the market a few weeks ago while sitting at the kitchen table and she decided to try to sit on my lap 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️.

Such a baby 🙄.

Quinn decided to take Baby Sophie on our walk last week so there were two Sophie’s 😂

🥰

🤦🏻‍♀️

Sansa continues to be our best behaved child 😉

She’s such a pretty girl 😍

My dear friend and Mimi to my boy, Marsha, said goodbye to her beautiful girl this week. She was such a good dog and Quinn and I loved her very much. 

We’ll miss you, Chloe bear 💜. 

Dogs really are the best. We don’t deserve them. 

If you didn’t already hear our news, Quinn is going to be a big brother in March! I had my first appointment last week, despite being already 12 weeks along. I’m going to Marietta this time around and they had a hard time getting me scheduled in. I had to travel to Belpre for this appointment but my future ones will be in Marietta. The bar was set pretty low considering my last pregnancy experience, but this doctor and staff were wonderful, regardless. I had an ultrasound first and then saw the doctor. They allowed Philip to come in the room right away, whereas Reynolds’ policy is to take the mother back first, do the ultrasound, and then bring the father back if everything checks out (pre-Covid. The last time I was there, the father wasn’t allowed to go at all). We hated that policy and were relieved when we didn’t have to endure it again this time. The ultrasound tech was super efficient, friendly, and quick, and the whole thing only lasted about 10 minutes. Ten minutes is all it took to relieve the breath  I had been holding since we found out. There was extreme anxiety in the beginning and I didn’t allow myself to get attached or make any plans. It was all riding on this confirmation that everything is okay. The doctor said at this point, the chance for miscarriage is 1% and we (him but now us) are no longer worried about miscarriage. I opted to do the bloodwork to find out the sex and got the results back this week. That’s exciting to me because that’s what I needed to know to move on. If it’s another boy, we already have clothes that I saved of Quinn’s and need next to nothing. If it’s a girl, we have some clothes to buy and some to get rid of and still need next to nothing. Kids come with so much shit. 

My first trimester ends next week and I’m hoping the second brings some relief to my constant state of nausea. Quinn has gotten so used to me complaining that he now says, “Mama nauseous again,” when I tell him my belly hurts 😂. He also tells me, “Mama sit down,” when I tell him I need a break before I can do something for him 😆. There are some words he says completely clearly and nauseous is one of them. Philip started telling him I feel sick because there’s a baby in my belly and he told him, “get it!” He also says there are two but I’ve corrected him several times; there’s only one. We checked. When we went to my appointment, we dropped him off with Mimi and told him we were going to go make sure the baby was okay. That night at bedtime, he kept saying, “Baby okay?” 🥰 He loves having conversations at bedtime now, and I use the word conversation lightly; a more accurate word would probably be distractions. He insists that the bed is wet (It’s not), he sees a fly (he doesn’t), Sansa is coming (she’s asleep on the floor). Anything to keep himself awake 🤦🏻‍♀️. Anyway, before I get too far off course, I just wanted to express how thankful I am to Marsha for watching him so that Philip could go with me to the appointment. It’s our second (well, third) time around so if we didn’t have someone, he could’ve stayed home with Quinn, but having him be able to go was really great. I just really appreciate the people in my life who change their schedules or make an effort to help me when they don’t have to. Family isn’t always blood, it’s who chooses to be there for you, and I love mine so much 🥰.

It’s going to be a wild ride having two kids, especially when the two year old has already started trying to manipulate us 🤦🏻‍♀️. Quinn asked me if he could bring his giraffe (a ride on toy) inside and I said, “No. Everything outside is wet.” He took that ruling and went over to Philip and asked him. Right in front of me. So at least he’s not good at it yet 😂. He is also not good at sneaking up on people, although he still thinks it’s hilarious. He will literally walk over to you and say, “Sneak!” 😅. Doesn’t matter that you saw him coming. He also thinks “stealing” is really funny. Sometimes he’ll grab a bite of food off your plate and say, “stealing!” Sometimes you’ll give him a bite and he still says it 🤦🏻‍♀️. He now wants to dictate what kind of pics I take of him and he insisted I take a photo of him “stealing,” and when he sees it in my camera roll, he tells me that’s what it is 😂. 

This is him “stealing” a piece of a peanut butter sandwich I sat aside for him 😆. And him laughing so much about it he was drooling 🤦🏻‍♀️.

One day Quinn was messing with the pictures hanging on the wall and I told him he could only look at them with his eyes, and not touch them with his hands. This is him looking at them with his eyes:

😂😂😂😂

He will also bring me inanimate objects and tell me they’re looking at me with their eyes. Again, he identifies this behavior on camera 🤦🏻‍♀️. 

This is his giraffe bank looking at me with his eyes. Even though his eyes are literally looking in another direction 😂.

Speaking of looking at pictures on my phone, I created an album of just his animal friends that I plan to have printed for him. He’s always trying to “pet” and “hug” them on my phone 😍. Our one neighbor dog, Steele, comes over to visit sometimes and I let him in the back yard to play with the girls. Beside him lives Bear, and Quinn is a broken record on our walks with, “Bear come,” if he doesn’t get to see him. I had to ask Bear’s dad to allow him to come down on the trail to say hi to quiet him 🤦🏻‍♀️. We didn’t even really know this guy yet but there I was, standing on the trail, trying to get his attention as he’s sitting on his deck with a friend, just to ask if we could say hi to his dog 😂. It was worth it though because now he always lets him come visit if he sees us and that makes our little one’s day. And keeps him from repeating himself, which we all know how much I love 😉. The day I asked for Bear to come down, Quinn had refused to wear a shirt on our walk. I made him put on shorts but he won the shirt battle. There are other “regulars” that we see walking most days and one couple was coming towards us right when we decided it was close enough for Quinn to be allowed to walk (or maybe ride his scooter, I’m not sure. He does that most days now). Anyway, they were coming towards us, Quinn started walking with some sass towards them…while playing with his nipples 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️. Really kid?? If that wasn’t bad enough, I got permission for Bear to come visit and his dad came, too, and Quinn kept getting in like a plank position. Bear’s dad, who has a human name but I like that one better 😉, was like, “Are you trying to do a push-up, buddy?” Ummm, not quite. He was getting down low enough so that he could look at Bear’s weiner that was sticking out quite prominently after sniffing our girls 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️. 

Our neighborhood squad 🐶 🐶 🐶 🐶 

He’s not the only one making the family seem questionable though. Pregnancy brain is a real thing and I apparently have it. When we were at my doctor’s appointment, I had given them my medical history form that they mailed to me and I completed the night before. Listed under previous pregnancies, I wrote Quinn’s birthday as 7/19/21. He was born 7/10/19. I didn’t get the day or the year right 😂🤦🏻‍♀️. The nurse was like, “Wow, you really have pregnancy brain, huh?” 🤦🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️.

At least Quinn has several redeeming qualities. He’s still a really good helper, like how, the other day, he put the popsicle mold in the freezer. It didn’t have any liquid in it so he didn’t make popsicles or anything but he tried 😂🤷🏻‍♀️. He loves helping take the groceries out of the bags when we get home from picking them up. I’m pretty sure he only does this because he wants to know what I bought though 😆. He likes any opportunity to use his tools, and even invents problems to need them for 😂. He constantly tells me Grogu (his scooter) is broken, turns it over, and uses his drill to “fix” it. He also went into the building one day to get the bike tire pump and “pumped up” his tires that don’t have air in them 🤣. He cracks me up. We were getting ready for bed the other night and I said, “Did you toot? You stink.” Quinn replied, “No! Bath!” I laughed and told him I knew he took a bath but his toot stunk 😂🤦🏻‍♀️. Some of the connections he makes surprises me. He can say his whole name, not clearly to anyone other than Philip and me, but he says it. He recently noticed when I called Sansa, Sansa Lynn, and now thinks it’s funny to call her that. We told him Sophie and Sansa have a middle name, just like him. I explained that his middle name is Oliver and theirs are Lynn. He said, “Sophie Oliver,” so that obviously made sense to him 😂😉. He’s branching out in his video interests (thank goodness. I like Blippi alright now but I am all for something else!) but he makes ridiculous requests, like yellow horse, green basketball, and dinosaur backhoe, to name a few. The funniest part though is that we can usually find something to fit those descriptions. YouTube is a crazy place. 

Fixing Grogu 

Pumping up his tires 😉

Helping me put together our new outdoor furniture. I needed the help. Allen wrenches are stupid. It’s 2021, there has to be a better way to do things 🙄.
I bitched for 2 hours. Philip said he would help me but then he wouldn’t have any entertainment 🙄🙄. But then he did help me 😝.

He went to get his knife so he could help me cut up the cardboard box 😂.

Quinn has learned the context in which we say, “enough,” like when he requests a second piece of cheesecake 🤦🏻‍♀️(that kid lovessss cheesecake). So now, we’ll say he’s had enough of things, like he’ll hand you his bink and say, “Enough bink.” Philip was putting food on his plate for dinner and he said, “Enough!” 🤣

It’s not always sunshine and roses around here though, of course. Quinn very much enjoys hiding when we tell him he needs to get his diaper changed 🙄. He was doing great with using the potty a few times a day but seems to have lost interest 😕. We had a really not fun episode with a diaper change the other day. Quinn likes to get changed while laying on his big elephant toy on the floor. He had another surprise poop (🙄) that I wasn’t prepared for when I opened his diaper. Right as I turned around to get more wipes and a plastic bag, Sansa came over to him excitedly, as she does anytime someone is on the floor 🙄, stepped in his poop and walked away. 😳😳😳 I was like WTF do I do now? Clean the kid? Clean the dog? Clean the floor??! I knew I had to be worried about Quinn stepping in Sansa’s poop; I had no idea I needed to worry about her stepping in his 🤦🏻‍♀️. I was so mad at her 😂. 

Philip had his own snafu with bodily fluids. He put Quinn in the bathtub a few weeks ago and Quinn was still standing in the water when Philip was just about to sit down in front of the tub and Quinn started peeing 😂. He got Philip’s foot and the bathroom floor, but a few seconds later and Philip would’ve been way worse off 🤣🤣🤣. Okay, that one was pretty funny. I was also in the bathroom at that time and I busted out laughing 😝. However, teeth brushing has become a struggle, which may be due to him getting his 2 year molars in on the bottom. I tried baiting him with an exchange—he can brush my teeth and I brush his. This only worked for a few days. I don’t want to traumatize him by holding him down and doing it but we need to find a solution ASAP. My typical strategy to get him to do things he doesn’t want to do is to wait for him to ask me to do something (which is every 5 seconds), and then say “Yes, I’ll do XYZ, just as soon as you do _______.” It almost always works. Almost. 

Washing his hair is another annoyance. He’ll dump water over his head and in his face all day long, but just try to rinse shampoo out of his hair and he acts like you’re hurting him 🙄. I’d let him do it if he could aim better and rinse his whole head 😂. He only gets the front part. People say girls are dramatic but he can turn it on sometimes. One day I was getting ready to go to the market, and I was making soup for dinner before we left. Quinn insisted he wanted to go outside though. We have a big window in the kitchen and a camera on the patio so I told him he could play right there where I could see him. I left the window open so I could hear him, too. At first he was playing with his water table but then I didn’t hear him pouring anymore so I looked out to see this:

He was just waiting to leave 😂😂😂😂. Not hurt. Didn’t fall. I asked him what he was doing and he said, “Go to market!” 🙄🤦🏻‍♀️

He got his first bee sting a few weeks ago. I’m always telling him, and him telling me, too, actually, that he needs to wear shoes because of the bees. I guess he has slipped his teenager pants on (well, not really. Getting him to wear pants is a challenge. Teenager diaper maybe? 😂) and decided he doesn’t need my advice and constantly goes outside barefoot. However, it happened on the deck and I couldn’t even fault him for not wearing shoes there because I wouldn’t have either. He didn’t freak out as much as expected. He just came inside and told me his foot had a boo boo and cried a little bit. I checked his foot and then went to look where he had been. Sure enough, a wood bore bee was squished from where he had stepped on it. He recovered quickly and didn’t mention it again so it didn’t traumatize him too much. Unlike the scrape he got on his knee from tripping over Grogu 🤦🏻‍♀️. It has healed and there’s barely even a scab left but he still tells me about it every day. 

One thing that happened that freaked me out but didn’t really register to him was the allergic reaction he had to some new blankets we got in the mail. As I was opening them and getting ready to take them to the basement to be washed, he wrapped himself in them. Shortly after, he started breaking out in a rash all over his arms and legs. Thankfully he actually had clothes on that day. I immediately gave him a bath and it cleared right up. This happened once to a dog we had, Jade. She laid on a decorative pillow I had bought and it made her break out in hives. A bath cleared her up, too. I read somewhere that companies often put scotch guard on items like that and it can cause animals, and toddlers, apparently, to break out. 

Luckily, our boy is very resilient and bounces back to his happy self in no time. I absolutely love seeing the looks of pure joy on his face over every day things. When we let him out of his stroller on our walk and the first stride he takes on his scooter always lights his face up. When Philip puts him on his shoulders and pretends to be a horse is another occurrence that brings big smiles. Sometimes even just playing hide and seek will make his day. 

The first place I noticed his rash when I was putting on his shoes. 

Look at that face ❤️. 

Given the recent tragedy in our community, that we, unfortunately, had a front row seat to the search as it happened right across the river from our house, I’m feeling extra thankful for my boy. I can’t imagine the pain and suffering that poor child’s family is dealing with. My heart really goes out to them 💞.