The last three weeks have been interesting. Just as we were all recovering from COVID, the boys each got an ear infection. Quinn’s was so bad that he was literally falling over. That’s actually how we knew he needed to see a doctor, since he never specifically complained about his ear hurting. He has a weirdly high tolerance for pain, though, I think. He burned his arm on a hot skillet when he was one and I didn’t even know it had blistered until I saw it hours later because he only cried for a second over it 😳. So yeah, he kept just randomly falling down while walking because his equilibrium was all messed up. Of course, he chose this time to climb on every possible thing he could think of. Three year olds: making the good decisions.
They can turn anything into a power struggle; even coughing. I took him to EZ Care because his doctor was all booked up. The doctor there diagnosed his ear infection and said that the coughing he was doing was due to post nasal drip. Who knew asking someone to cover their mouth while coughing could be interpreted as a challenge 🙄. He was hacking indiscriminately on everyone and everything, driving me nuts. I know he couldn’t help his coughing but he is capable of covering his mouth. I kinda snapped after the millionth time reminding him—
M: Quinn. Please. Cover your mouth when you cough.
Q: I’m trying!
M: You’re not trying. You haven’t tried all day. I’ve told you a million times not to cough in people’s faces.
Q: I’m still learning!
M: I know you’re learning. I just want you to try.
Q: Stop asking me questions!
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🙄🙄🙄🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🙄🙄🙄
He picked that last part up from me. I’ve gotten so overwhelmed a few times that I’ve nicely asked him to stop asking me questions, so now he pulls that out when he’s being sassy.
I have several rolls of colored and patterned duck tape. Quinn likes to get it out and tell me he “needs” some 🙄. He told me to put a piece of tape on him. I asked if I could put it wherever I wanted and he agreed 🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️🤷🏻♀️.
A few other recent phrases and words he has started saying—stupid, what the hell, I just do, and scared me outta the crap 😂. I say “stupid” way too much and hoped he wouldn’t adopt that as an adjective, but he did, unfortunately. Philip and I have been trying to tell him it’s not really a nice word and he likes to point out that I say it 🤦🏻♀️. So that started the ‘sometimes adults say things that kids shouldn’t say’ conversation. His counter argument:
Q: “I’m a grownup.”
M: “You’re not.”
Q: “I am. I’m bigger. My legs are big.”
I’ve been pushing, “What the heck,” as a replacement for the more colorful one. He was at the park one day saying, “What the hell” to the kids there 🤦🏻♀️. An older boy told him that was a bad word. That boy was also kicking over trash cans, even when Philip told him to stop, so if I had to choose, I’d say my kid’s behavior was less bad 🤪.
Quinn can be so frustrating sometimes when you ask him a ‘why’ question and he answers with, “I just do.” It’s my fault he says it, but that doesn’t make it less annoying 😝. He will question things until you’re out of answers so he ends up with a, “It just does,” explanation.
He thinks it’s funny to scare people, and though he rarely actually succeeds, we pretend he does. He has scared me once or twice though and when he did, I said, “You scared the crap outta me!” He got the word order a bit mixed up and tells us, “You scared me outta the crap!,” if we scare him as a joke 😂. He is legitimately scared of the dark and he perceives rooms to be dark during the daytime if the curtains are closed and the light is off 🙄. We use to argue daily over turning the lights on vs. opening the curtains. Now when he wants to get something from his room but I’m in the living room, he’ll walk down the hallway, stop, and ask me, “There’s nothing to be scared of?” I’ll tell him there’s not and he’ll go get whatever it is he wants.
Another sassy thing he says, even though he doesn’t know it comes across as sassy, is “Looks like you’re not,” whenever you tell him you’re doing something, as in you’re busy, but aren’t physically doing it at that moment. An example would be like, when Philip comes upstairs for lunch and Quinn asked him to go outside to play with water balloons. Philip told him he couldn’t right then because he was working. Quinn responded, “It looks like you’re not” 😂🤦🏻♀️.
I had been trying to get Quinn to let me cut his hair all summer, but he refused. It’s his hair so I won’t force him to cut it. However, he watched me trim the back of Philip’s (he’s letting his grow out but the back was all wonky), and decided he wanted me to cut his. He won’t let me use trimmers, I had to cut it with scissors. As he has previously done, he decided when it was about 75% finished, that he he didn’t want to continue. He let me trim around his ears the following day, but any other time I’ve asked to fix some long and obviously uneven places, he says no. I told him he looks goofy and he told me, “I’m gonna walk around with it goofy. I’m not letting you cut it again” 🙄🙄🙄. He cracked me up when we took him to Sardis Dairy Bar one night when he said, “I’ve never been here with my short hair before” 😂😂.
Sometimes he says the funniest stuff, and you can’t help but laugh even when you don’t want to. We were having a really tough day and Philip had put Quinn in time out for who knows what at this point, but when he went to talk to him about whatever it is was, he told Quinn, “You can get up now,” and Quinn responded with, “But I’m still mean!” 🤦🏻♀️😩.
On another frustrating day, while we were on our walk, Philip was telling Quinn that he didn’t have his listening ears on that day. A little while later Quinn said:
“Mom, Asher won’t look at me.”
M: “What do you want me to do about that?”
Q: “Make him look at me.”
M: “Asher, look at Quinn.”
Q: “He’s still not looking at me.”
P: “He doesn’t understand yet when we tell him to do things.”
Q: “Asher, put your understand ears on.”
😂😂😂
He tried flipping that script to me the following day, telling me he didn’t understand when I yelled at him for jumping on the couch. We always say Asher doesn’t understand so he tried his luck with that one 🙄.
After fighting the biggest uphill battle to date with Quinn, we maybe, MAYBE, might have crested the mountain of limit testing and could possibly be working our way back down into the civilization of Pleasantville. I’m hesitant to even type those words, fearing the jinx that could prove me wrong and make me miserable. There are still trying days with constant whining and threats to throw all of his toys away, but there are definitely good moments again now, too. I was trying to focus on the positive the other day and thought about how Quinn is usually really good about cleaning up. That’s a battle we fought long and hard on, so I was guessing that’s why he usually don’t fight me on it anymore. Apparently, he needed a refresher, though, on why he doesn’t fight me, and decided to intentionally dump an entire 8x8 size foil pan full of water beads all over his bedroom floor. There was no reason for this. I was playing with him. We were having fun. He was scooping them and then I started hiding sea creatures in them for him to find. I was doing voices for them (he loves that), but then all of a sudden, he grabbed the pan with both hands. I warned him to put it down, telling him that if they spilled, I would not help him clean them up. He looked me right in the eye and turned the pan on it’s side. After a time out, I brought him back into his room to clean them up. There was massive loads of whining and pleas for me to help. I refused but I sat in there with him. At one point he started smashing the beads into the rug. I told him that was fine, he would get a rag when he was finished picking the rest of them up to clean up the smashed ones. He stopped doing that. It took 65 minutes but he picked every single one of them up. While Philip was upstairs for lunch that day, I told Quinn to go put something in his room. Quinn told Philip, “I know the rules. When you get something out, you have to put it away.” 🙃
He’s been saying that kinda often: “I know the rules.” That gives me hope that maybe something is sinking in. Finally. He was rambling on one day and Philip picked the exact wrong moment to tune him out and blindly agree with him, which just so happened to be Quinn saying that mom and dad aren’t the boss. I heard this go down and interjected, “No, we are the boss; we’re in charge.” Philip gave only a half-hearted response in agreement, because he was distracted doing something. I’m not even sure now what had happened but I put Quinn to bed a little early that night, and while we were talking, he asked why dad said he’s not the boss. I assured him dad just made a mistake and that he and I are definitely the boss. After he fell asleep, I told Philip he needed to remedy that. Sure enough, the following day, Quinn asked him why he said that. Philip did, then, tell him he didn’t mean to say that and all was forgotten shortly after, but it was a nice lesson for Dad to learn not to agree to things when he’s distracted 😝.
Now that we’ve had quite a few good days, and I’ve gotten a reprieve from what was constant conflict, it’s easier to keep my calm when Quinn does have challenging behaviors. I’ve read many times to change your mindset when kids are seeking attention, to think of it as seeking connection. That really does help to make me be more understanding, and truthfully, I yearn for connection to him sometimes, too. When we were in the thick of this most recent challenging phase, I often missed the times we’ve spent together playing and learning, and just doing anything besides driving each other crazy. He’s so smart and self aware sometimes, it’s amazing. He literally told me today, when he was bugging me while I was trying to feed Asher, that he was trying to get my attention. I was like, “I know you are, and I will be glad to give it to you just as soon as Asher is finished eating.”
I’ve been trying really hard to focus on Quinn’s good qualities and stay positive in my interactions with him. He’s a really great kid and I love him with my whole heart, and I remember that when we haven’t spent 45 straight days arguing with each other 🤪. He willingly shares his food without anyone asking, he loves his little brother so much, he makes me laugh, and he has the biggest imagination.
An example of those last two—
Philip and Quinn were playing a version of cops and robbers:
Q: *Calls police*
P: Hello. This is Officer Dad.
Q: Hello, cops! I need someone to get a robber!
P: Okay, what did he look like?
Q: He looked like a robber!
P: What color hair did he have?
Q: Blue.
P: How tall was he?
Q: This tall! *gestures with his hand*
P: Did he have any other identifying marks?
Q: Yes.
P: What did he have?
Q: Eyeballs.
M: 😂😂😂😂😂
Quinn also has an ulterior personality, Sia. He’s a firefighter that Quinn morphs into when fighting pretend fires. I have no idea where he came up with that name. He has a pretend dog named Wolfie, who gets into all kinds of predicaments, while also getting the blame for some suspicious things. Lots of kids have imaginary friends, is it at all surprising that ours has an imaginary dog? 😂 His doll, Damon, gets into some interesting situations, too, many of which mimic things Asher does.
Quinn had to comfort Damon because he got upset when he was hungry 😉 ❤️.
Quinn is super articulate for his age but he sometimes puts a W sound in words where it doesn’t belong like zwip and cwereal. He can’t pronounce the L sound yet and will occasionally replace it with W. He and Philip have this running conversation every night on our walk where Philip asks Quinn if he sees any groundhogs and Quinn always says, “Stop it, Dad! They’re sweeping!” 😆
He makes me laugh because he always thinks I can fix everything. We went to Walmart and I bought Philip some pop tarts. He likes those nasty unfrosted strawberry ones. When we got home, Q said he wanted one so Philip gave one to him. He took a bite and then came to me and said, “Mom, this doesn’t have any flavor. Fix it.” 😂😂😂😂 Agreed, child, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’m not the best at being overly physically affectionate. If I had to guess without psychoanalyzing myself, I’d say it’s because of my palmar hyperhidrosis (my hands sweat like crazy, like all of the time). I’m pretty programmed to keep my hands to myself because I realize that sweaty palms is off putting to other people. Granted, Philip is used to them and has been around for 20 years so he just has to endure my constant condensation 😝. But I wouldn’t say that it hasn’t shaped my behaviors as far as touching goes. However, every night, when I lay down with Quinn at bedtime, I put my arm under his pillow (at his request) and his hand always finds mine. It surprises me how much I like that he does that. My hands aren’t like a leaky faucet; they do stop sweating sometimes—being calm helps. They’re usually pretty dry during these times. Unless, of course, I start thinking about it and that will get the sweat flowing every time 🙄. Anyway, it’s a sweet gesture that I hope doesn’t stop someday when he gets a hand that isn’t dry.
Sophie is the opposite of me and shows affection any chance she gets. She’s really starting to come out of her shell and even gives Quinn kisses occasionally. Every time she does, Quinn laughs and says, “She’s kissing me all up!” But then he wants me to do it, too—fill his dog slobbered face with kisses 🤦🏻♀️😂. Actually, he’s really big on making sure everyone gets kisses. Hugs, too. Anytime Philip or I are leaving the house or telling the boys goodnight, Quinn makes sure the remaining family members are all kissed and hugged, dictating who needs loved on next- “Give Ash a hug and a kiss,” “Give Mom a hug and a kiss.” It’s sweet 🥰.
Sophie kisses 😛
Quinn tells me all of the time that he loves Asher. He took over a game I play with Ash at bath time, because it usually makes him laugh, trying it at random times. When I get Ash out of the tub, I wrap him up in the towel and we play Baby Taco. I ask him what kind of toppings he has, tilting my face up toward the ceiling and then bringing it back down while saying an ingredient—“Do you have cheese on you?,” “Do you have guacamole on you?” Asher thinks it’s funny. It’s cute when Quinn tries to play with him but Quinn obviously doesn’t know taco toppings because he’ll go over to Asher and just be like, “Do you have mustard on you?!” Ash is just like 😶 and Quinn will ask, “Why he not laugh?” 🤭.
I love watching them play together, and this is just the beginning 💙💙.
Speaking of food, Asher started eating some baby food last week. I tried rice cereal and we didn’t get very far. Babies instinctively spit out food until they build the muscles in their tongues to be able to move it around better. I moved onto green beans and he did much better with that texture. We tried sweet potatoes a few days later and he seemed to like both. I tried the rice cereal again and it made him cry 😅, so I mixed it with green beans and he ate a ton of it. I’ll be glad when he starts eating more solids and needing less milk, although I’m already down to only pumping twice a day. He nurses in the morning, before and after nap, and before bed. He can nurse for as long as he wants, but I only plan to pump until he’s one, like I did for Quinn. Our feeding journey has been so much easier than exclusively pumping for Quinn was. It’s unbelievable that we’re already halfway through it this week! Asher turned 6 months old yesterday. He’s such a good baby. Although, he is a roly-poly, and makes changing his diaper lots of fun 🙄😜. His smile is contagious. He recently started making an S sound, so we’ve been calling him a snake. It’s a funny noise and he just randomly does it.
🙂
6 months old already!
Asher is now big enough for his jumper (his feet can rest completely flat on the floor), and he finally has a place to get out some of his energy. His legs are constantly kicking! We tell him he has fast feet when he gets all wound up, and he smiles. I have a feeling when that boy learns to walk that we’re gonna be in trouble.
It’s hard to get a clear pic when he’s jumping 🤪. Big brother is always right there to help ❤️.
Ash grabs anything within reach and tries to eat it. This includes other people’s faces. Quinn thinks it’s funny when Ash grabs his hand and let’s him gnaw on it, proclaiming, “He’s trying to eat me!” 😂. It could get really dangerous now because he has his two bottom teeth and he can chomp pretty hard when he wants to 😳.
Ash is already empathetic and cries sometimes when Quinn gets upset. I can’t tell you how much I love when they both cry at the same time 🤪.
Poor Asher had a legit reason to cry 2 weekends ago when he got his leg stuck in the toddler rail on Quinn’s bed. I laid him there to watch his mobile while I was loading the dishwasher. I heard him start crying, a cry that I knew was pain, and went running into the room. He had wiggled sideways and gotten his leg trapped between the slats of the rail. I tried pushing his foot back through, and when that didn’t work, I tried picking him up, to possibly loosen it from a different angle. That may have wedged it further, I’m honestly not sure. When it became apparent that I couldn’t get it, I yelled for Philip to come help me. He tried like I did and couldn’t get it loose either. By that point, Asher was hysterical. Philip said he didn’t know how else to get it out except to saw a slat off of the bed. I told him to get the saw because Asher’s leg was turning blue. He ran to the basement to get it while I tried to calm Ash down. We had him out within another minute and luckily, it only left a bruise on his leg. I had been planning on putting the crib rail back on since he can roll now, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Now I’m glad I didn’t because it would’ve been even harder maneuvering with the taller rail. I took the whole crib apart afterwards and just left the mattress on the floor. I used a hack I saw on Pinterest—pool noodles under the sheet around the edge so that he can’t roll off, but I also put on a blanket beside it on the floor just in case he does. He never actually sleeps there so I’m not worried about the safety of it.
I tried my hardest to break it while Philip was getting the saw. I like to think that if he had been working and couldn’t help, my adrenaline would’ve kicked in to give me hulk-like strength 😉.
☹️
He really likes that mobile. I wish the music lasted longer than 2.5 minutes before needing rewound 😑.
It was just the timing but it looks like Ash is covering his mouth while laughing 🤭.
We had a debate about whose bed this was now…
For the record, this is how much room I have to sleep. I’m thinking of taking the crib mattress for myself 😜.
I want to take a moment to share some thoughts about another kid. I may be relatively new to motherhood but I’ve been an aunt for a long time. Seventeen years, to be exact, and Haleigh was the first to make me one. She and her siblings were my surrogate children before my own came along. They helped teach me how to love little people, but now Haleigh isn’t so little anymore. She’s just starting her senior year in high school but I know this year is going to fly by. She hasn’t decided where she’s going to college, but she will most likely move away while she’s there. I’m going to miss her so much, but I’m so excited to see where life takes her. She has really started to blossom over the past year—figuring out her interests and finding friends worth having. It’s been amazing watching her grow from that little girl who used to steal my tip money out of my wallet, and dunk her Oreos in my milk, to a beautiful, confident young woman. I will never have a girl of my own, but having Haleigh and her sister, Kate, in my life definitely makes up for it.
Just look at how beautiful she is 😍.
She asked me to help her paint her parking spot at school. I drew and outlined the daisies and she filled them in. I made her a stencil for the butterflies on my Cricut. There’s no way I could’ve freehanded them because if they weren’t symmetrical (and they wouldn’t be 🥴), I couldn’t stand it 😝.
She wanted to put Quinn’s handprint and Asher’s footprint, as well as her little brother’s and sister’s handprints, in the middle of a flower. Quinn and Ash made them a little wonky but it was a sweet idea anyway 🥰.
I took the boys over to the sunflower field to do some pics, and met up with my brother and his family (minus my oldest nephew because he’s a teenager 🙄). I wanted to do some with Sophie so Philip and I went back over a few days later. I did not get a perfect shot 😂. She was way too worked up because there were several people there. And we forgot treats, which was a rookie mistake 😂.
Quinn had his camera so he could take pics 😆. That’s what’s in his hand.
The inevitable kiss 😘. Quinn has refused to wear shorts all summer, but I convinced him to wear his shorteralls so that he would match Asher when we did pics the first day. When I told him I was going to take pics of Soph, he went and got them to put back on 😆. Apparently, those are part of his sunflower picture uniform 🤪.
Soph had to give Ash a kiss, too 😛.
As good as it got 🤷🏻♀️. Quinn wouldn’t take his dinosaur out of his mouth 🙄.
If only they could both look at the camera at the same time 🤪
❤️
I really wish Coen would have come 😔. But I love this pic anyway 🥰.
🌻
Some other fun things we’ve done recently:
I made a sensory experience with kinetic sand and sea creature erasers. We pretended to be a crab and catch the creatures with hair clips.
We made crab crafts to go along with our theme 🦀
We made sun catchers with glue and sequins. I used lids from oatmeal containers to shape them. It took about 2 days to dry completely and then they just peeled right out.
We did some shake art using a peanut butter jar, paper, paint, and rocks.
We repurposed his Paw Patrol smoothie cups and turned them into bowling pins. Quinn filled them with beans and I used the balloons that he pumped up and scattered all over the house as lids. I just popped them and stretched them over the top and secured each with a rubber band.
The super fun water beads, minutes before they became super not fun 😝.
We worked on coloring within lines and to make him more aware of the lines, I drew pictures with glue so that they would stand out. He colored a tractor with markers…
And a flame and a dinosaur with chalk.
He really likes the idea of “inside chalk” 😆.
We played a guessing game like we’ve seen kids do on YouTube. Quinn was surprisingly good at it! We had a basket of pretend food but then Philip slipped him a piece of cheese and Quinn said, “It’s real cheese!” 😂
Quinn and I attended a family dance party held by the Center for Children and Families. It was a lot of fun!
He tried cotton candy for the first time with Mimi.
We did an experiment with oil and water. Quinn dropped colored water into a dish with oil and then used a whisk to try to mix it up.
We then used that same water to make a string painting. I clipped strings to clothespins and then dipped the string into the water. Quinn laid the string onto a piece of folded card stock and then pulled it out, creating a string painting.
Quinn is very into drawing right now (and moving chairs to climb on to reach things in the pantry 🙄). He drew this picture and said it was me 😄.
We made a painting with the boys’ cousins and their friends, using colored water and straws. They dipped the straws into the water and then blew on the paper. It was the quietest activity we’ve ever done 😂.
The two older girls got light headed from blowing too hard 🤦🏻♀️
They turned out super cool though!
We took the boys to the fair..
Quinn got to pet a dinosaur. They asked for a kid volunteer to roar at it and when they did, Asher cried 😅.
He rode rides for the first time. He liked the carousel and even rode a small version of a Ferris wheel. He also liked petting the animals in the barn.
My little cheeser. He loves photo shoots 🙂.
❤️
My smiley boy
Dad captured this cute pic ❤️
We practiced some life skills—using keys to unlock small locks. I took this barn with the locks on it to the farmers market a few weeks ago to help keep Quinn occupied. Several kids stopped by and they were all very into the locks. They’re just a set of luggage locks with color coordinating keys. I locked him out of the bathroom the other day because he wouldn’t stop opening the door and letting my warm air out after my shower. He went and got a keychain with random keys that we gave him to play with and found one that worked to open the door 🤦🏻♀️
We’ve been practicing using scissors. He still has a long way to go 🫣.
We played with Quinn’s favorite things—colored vinegar and baking soda. I added some dinosaurs so he could pretend to make lava around them.
When he finished with that, I swapped the vinegar for water, sprayed some shaving cream on top of a pitcher of water, and talked about how rain works. The shaving cream represented a cloud.
Ash had some fun, too. He played drums…
I made him a sensory bag with some of the water beads Quinn dumped all over the floor 🙄.
He concentrated really hard on brushing Quinn’s teeth 🤣.
He got to float around the hot (cool) tub in his floaty.
He explored some sensory bottles I originally made for Quinn, repurposing my pumping bottles.
He was less than impressed to be swinging with me at the park 😆.
He played in the ball pit with Quinn.
He helped me fold laundry. Just kidding—he actually sat there for about 2.5 seconds and then made me hold him while I folded 3 baskets of clothes 🤦🏻♀️.
He spent lots of time cuddling Mama 💙💙💙
Mostly, he just sat around looking so completely adorable 🥰.
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