Quinn has three weeks of his school year under his belt! He loves it. I was worried the first day drop off would be full of tears and protests, but he didn’t cry, gave me a hug, and told me “bye.” When I picked him up, I asked if he cried after I left and he said, “No, I was so freakin’ brave!” ð. He was excited to go back again the next day. We were talking about it yesterday before it was time to leave and he said, “I like going to school.” I said, “I’m glad you like it,” and he went on to say, “Yeah, I like being away from you sometimes.” ððð. The feeling is definitely mutual, kid ðĪŠ. I had my first Mom Fail™️ involving school because I didn’t look in his backpack last week since he carried it to the car and that’s where we leave it. I went to get it for him to take in with him on Wednesday and realized there were papers in it. Inside was a snack calendar and Quinn’s name was on that day, meaning we were supposed to provide snack ðĪĶðŧ♀️ðĪĶðŧ♀️. I told them I goofed and said I would go get something and bring it back, but they insisted they had plenty of extras and to not worry about it. I have a reminder in my phone for next month though! ðŽ
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Apparently, they’re miracle workers at the Little Red Schoolhouse because I tried teaching Quinn to count to 20 for months, and after one day at preschool, he came home rattling the numbers off in the correct order, only missing 14 and 15. I know that can actually be attributed to the new environment and group think, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit insulted ðĪŠð.
Quinn and I haven’t had many learning sessions in the last several months, and I recently began wondering why that is. At first, I blamed the fact that is was summer, which brought more responsibilities with outside chores, like mowing, gardening, weeding, etc.. Then I thought of another possibility, which is that Ash is now much more independent than he used to be, and this allows me more time to catch up on the many, many tasks that had long been pushed aside and ignored. Not to mention, my market manager job officially runs May-September, excluding the pre and post season work. I’ve been feeling some Mom Guilt ™️ over the minimal amount of activities I have done with Ash thus far, as compared to how many I had done with Quinn at the same age. This renewed my commitment to both of them, but for the first craft in a long time, Quinn quickly reminded me of his stubbornness and how he’s in an uncooperative stage of life ð. I attempted to do something with both of them that Quinn and I had done previously, but which required following instructions, and it did not go well. Luckily, we’ve done more since then that went better, but we’re going to work on following directions in play more.
I didn’t even get pics with Quinn because he was being a butthead. Ash dumped the colored water alllll over the deck. Definitely a fail ððŧ.
5 Little Monkeys on the felt board
Remembering the sequence of events
I started to make them quiet books before our vacation but I didn’t get the chance to finish them, so I gave them the pieces to play with on the felt board.
A fire truck for Quinn,
A giraffe with teeth to brush for Ash, and a dog with changeable bandanas for both of them. I had plans for more, but, again, ran out of time.
I ordered tape that looks like a road. Quinn picked out the businesses for his city—Wendy’s, Walmart, Peking, and Dollar Tree ð .
Ash mastered the superhero matching game I made for him ð.
Ash played with play doh for the first time. Well, the first time we focused on play, and he wasn’t just taking bites ð.
We attempted using chopsticks to pick up pieces of pipe cleaners. Ash couldn’t quite get the hang of them yet. He can squeeze them, but he couldn’t do it to make a connection with the pieces.
Ashy used a magnet wand to pick up the pieces of pipe cleaners and then put them into a bottle while Quinn was at school one day.
I got out last year’s Halloween themed sensory bin for the boys to play with. It seemed a little early, but every day feels like Halloween in our house ðĪ·ðŧ♀️.
Unsurprisingly, Quinn turned into a witch…
And the skeleton hand became a magic wand to shoot him ðĪĶðŧ♀️ð.
Quinn is learning to write and sign letters at school. That’s the A he wrote.
When I wrote some words in chalk on our patio, Quinn thought it was hilarious when he put a line through my O to make it into a Q ð. He also wrote that A in Asher’s name ð.
I got them some fun suction toys for the bathtub so we could talk about letters during bath time.
I should’ve gotten 2 sets so Quinn could properly spell his name ðŽ.
Quinn gets frustrated with me, just like I do him, when I don’t follow his directions to say whatever nonsense he wants me to. Usually, it’s because I had tuned out the saga that he is scripting out loud while I’m trying to do other things. He’ll tell me to call a firefighter, or the police, or the Avengers, and say something specific, but if I don’t get it right, he’ll say, “No! Mom, you’re ruining the project! Say it this way…” I don’t even know where he learned that phrase, but I get it told to me often ð.
Something else he likes to say, having picked it up from me, is “You’re making a bad choice!” We saw someone who lives a few blocks away from us drive by one day with a small child sitting in the front seat without a seat belt on (Not that the seat belt would have done much in the event of a crash, since it wouldn’t have fit the child properly.) When Quinn asked why that child was allowed to ride in the front seat and he isn’t, I said, “I don’t know, Bud, sometimes parents make bad choices.” Well, that stuck with him, of course. A few days later, we were deciding on whether or not to go for our evening walk because it was forecasted to rain. I said we should go since the chance was low, so we did. When we were walking down the driveway it started to sprinkle, but it wasn’t raining enough to concern me. However, it concerned Quinn because he told me, “Mom, you’re making a bad choice!” ðð I laughed and continued our walk. I’m happy to report we didn’t melt ðĪŠ.
The sass is strong with that one. He’s definitely a 4 year old know it all, and he drives me crazy with it. He just doesn’t know when to quit unless I lay it out for him like this: “Do you want to go in Time Out, or do you want to stop arguing with me?” He always chooses the latter, so it’s effective ð. He randomly started a conversation with me the other day with, “Mom, why am I not sassy at school, but I’m sassy at home?” It proceeded like this:
M: “I think you’re the only one who can answer that question, Quinn.”
Q: “Well, because I want to be nice at school because if I’m sassy the police will come and they might give me a ticket, and it might take $5 and I don’t have $5.”
M: “Well, what if I start giving you tickets at home when you’re sassy? Will you be nice then?”
Q: “Mom, you can’t give me tickets, you’re not even a police.”
M: “What if I became a police?”
Q: “You can’t because you have to stay home with me and Ash.”
That boy has an answer for everything ð. He has some funny ideas about what will happen when he’s an adult and has his own house. He can’t quite wrap his head around not wanting to live with us when he’s a grown up, so he goes back and forth between saying he’s going to live with us, and then giving rules for his adult house, like no screaming and keeping the floor clean. I am on board with both of those ð. He asked me one day if I remember when Ash was in my belly and I had to go to the hospital and have the doctor take him out. I assured him I will never forget that ð. He said he wants to grow a baby in his belly, but I told him only girls can do that, so he told me he’s going to find a girl to grow a baby for him. We then had the following conversation:
Q: “Taking care of babies is hard, Mom.”
M: “It is?”
Q: “Yeah, you gotta change their poopy diapers and everything.”
M: “Oh. I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Q: “You literally change Ash’s diaper all of the time. I can tell you know.”
It’s hilarious when he picks up words we say all of the time, like “literally.” He’s been saying, “Obviously,” too. He uses those correctly, but I’m not convinced he knows what literally means. He also says, “That reminds me,” but then proceeds to say something off the wall that doesn’t relate to what we were talking about ð. I like it best when he gets phrases wrong, like when he says, “Holy crack!,” in place of crap ð. I asked him one day if he helped clean up toys at school and that made him start singing the clean up song, only his version of it, which included the line: ðĩ clean up, clean up, everybody do the chair ðĩ(instead of “do your share”)ðð. You can’t always trust what he says, even when he gets it right, because 9 times out of 10, if he says he doesn’t feel good, it means he’s about to transform into a werewolf, not that he’s actually feeling sick ððĪĶðŧ♀️.
I wanted him to stand by some wildflowers so I could get an idea of whether or not they would be good as a backdrop for a photo shoot. He couldn’t help but to give me werewolf claws in my practice pics ððĪĶðŧ♀️.
Despite his inclination to change species, Quinn is maturing into a (relatively) well behaved little boy. He got his first dose of responsibility last week when I bribed him to help me while I was mowing. Typically, I bring the play yard fence outside to contain Ash while I mow the yard. However, it is currently filled with the 9,356 stuffed animals that my children own, making the relocation messy. I tested the waters at first, allowing Ash to be a free range baby on the patio/in the yard while I worked, but when he started going over to the neighbor’s swing set, which is out of my sight, I enlisted Quinn’s help. I offered to pay him $2 to play with Ash and keep him entertained where I could see them until I was done with the front yard. I sold it as though he was in charge of Ash and needed to keep him safe from going into the road. He was excited to earn money, so he did the job happily. When I gave him the two dollar bills, I expected him to want to go buy something right away. Instead, he told me to put it in his wallet ððĪ·ðŧ♀️. He hasn’t mentioned it since, aside from telling his friend about getting it.
Don’t think he isn’t still testing his limits, though. Every couple of days, it seems, he has to check to see if he can get away with something he knows not to do. He got a pretty big reaction from me after his first day of school. I hated the timing, but sometimes you have to fight battles when they need to be fought. After I picked him up from school, I took him to Stalder’s (his favorite) to get ice cream. Afterwards, we went to Walmart to look for a Thor costume, something he had been asking for for weeks. They didn’t have one, so I told him I would order one. On our way home, I told him I wanted to go through Wendy’s to get a tea and asked if he wanted anything. He said just a water (that was the first time he was given a drink choice and chose water, and he did it again the other day at Walmart. That makes me happy ð. Water is what we drink at home, but when we go out somewhere, he’s allowed to have something else). Anyway, the drive thru line was backed up forever, which is unusual for them. I loveeeee Wendy’s and go there often. During our wait, Quinn decided to pull on the passenger side seat belt that was in front of him, just because he could. I asked him to stop. He told me no, and continued to pull it out and wrap it around his foot. I explained that if he broke it, we wouldn’t be able to ride in my car anymore, but that didn’t resonate. After I told him to stop two more times and he didn’t, I told him I was going to put him back in a baby car seat. That also did not work. When I finally yelled at him, he stopped, but it was too late. I was already set on switching him back into a rear facing seat. Why does it take mom losing her shit to make children listen? As soon as we got home, I removed his Hulk booster seat from my car and replaced it with his old 4 in 1 seat that got handed down to Ash for Philip’s car. It was left that way for 3 days worth of trips, one of them being to the mall and back. At first, he told me he liked being turned around again, but he soon changed his mind and wanted turned back forward. I told him if he followed the rules on that third day and behaved well at the mall that I would switch his seat back when we got home. He did and I did, but I told him if he ever messed with the seat belt again, I would put the baby seat back in. He doesn’t know that he’s about 4 pounds away from the weight limit of using it rear facing, so he thinks this consequence will always be an option ð. He hasn’t touched it since.
It was super inconvenient for me to get him into the seat in the rear facing position, but there was no way I was gonna let him know that ð.
I don’t know which is worse, Quinn’s limit testing or Ash’s screaming phase ðĐ. He has so many opinions but not enough words to express them, which leads to tantrums when his message isn’t coming across correctly. However, when you do understand what he means and you say the right word, he has a specific giggle he does ð. It makes us laugh. He’s getting better at saying, “Mhmm,” or “Uh huh,” when you ask if he wants something. Or he brings us a snack to open, a costume to help put on, etc. and says, “Please.” He has mastered, “Up,” and knows almost every common animal sound. He has learned the word, “Laundry,” and says it while banging on the basement door when he wants to go downstairs ð. He often parrots the last word he hears. He learned the word “Funny,” this way, from me telling him he’s not being funny. If I tell him it’s time to change his diaper, he’ll run away instead, saying, “Punny!,” as he goes ð.
Ash likes to narrate what he’s doing, making him terrible at Hide and Seek. He will go hide and then stay there saying, “Hiding.” ð. He climbs on everything, making sure to say, “Climbing,” as he does. He even says, “Spinning,” and “Jumping,” as he does those, too. His jumping more closely resembles river dancing, but he tries, anyway ð.
I guess the Naruto run (head forward, arms back) is a typical toddler milestone because I remember Quinn doing it, too. As far as I know, Ash never saw anyone do it before he started ðĪ·ðŧ♀️. He accomplished another gross motor goal, which is walking up and down stairs while holding onto a rail. He doesn’t do it down the concrete outside steps yet, thank goodness, but he does it to go up, and on the basement stairs and anywhere else he gets the opportunity ðŽðĪĶðŧ♀️.
He has gotten really good at throwing away trash, but now I have to keep an eye on him because when he finishes something, he says, “All done,” and heads for the trash can. I found two of my Fiesta plates in the trash the other day ðĪĶðŧ♀️.
I told Quinn to go put on clean clothes before he went to school yesterday, so Ash decided he needed a new shirt, too—one of Quinn’s ð. No one in our house can change their shirt without Ash calling them Hulk ðð. Philip was getting in the shower one night while Ash was in the bathroom with him and when Philip took his shirt off, Ash said, “Hulk!,” and then, “Smash!” ðð.
Cutest Hulks ever ðĨ°.
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Half a Hulk ð
I surprised him by ordering him a Hulk figurine and letting him open the mail ð. Quinn got a Thor, his current obsession.
His costume came the same day ð.
I love when they dress alike ð.
Even our pajamas are like costumes ð.
Have you ever seen a Grogu Captain America before?
We don’t even need clothes to pretend to be a vampire ð
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Doesn’t everyone watch tv with a Spider-Man mask and their brother’s shirt on? ð
I think Ash’s separation anxiety phase is starting to subside, as I’ve left him three times now without any tears. Usually there’s a whole meltdown when I tell him I’m leaving but the last two times he stayed home with his dad, and once with my brother and Lori, he has told me bye and kept his cool.
I wish this new development in independence included weaning, but no such luck. I tried a trick I saw in a weaning from breastfeeding group I’m in, which was putting vinegar on my boobs. It didn’t even phase him ðĪĶðŧ♀️ðĪĶðŧ♀️. I think I’m going to just have to cut him off and deal with some tears for a few nights. I’d rather it go a different way, not I’m not hopeful it will.
I’m not surprised Ash wasn’t repelled by vinegar, my kids have unusual tastes; Quinn especially. He likes spicy food, and he never refuses an opportunity to taste lemon or lime juice when we get it out for a recipe ð.
Eating what he calls “spicy noodles.”
Poor Ash thought he wanted to taste the lemon juice, too ð
ð
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As usual, we’ve spent plenty of time outside in the past couple of weeks.
565 hours outside!
Painting with our feet ðĢ ðĻ. I got lots of bubble wrap in the mail with a package, so we put it to good use!
Our backyard tree started losing leaves already, so Quinn was quick to suggest raking them up to slide into ð.
Bubble wrap can keep 4 kids amused for a good while ð
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We went for a bike ride with our friends ❤️.
And saw more friends at playgroup. Ash hasn’t figured out how to hold his craft for a pic yet ð.
We saw Spike the dinosaur at the Sternwheel Festival in Marietta.
Quinn was psyched to get some popcorn, cotton candy, and….
A flight of ice cream! ðĻ ðĪĪ
We tried some Ethiopian food at story time at the library. Despite the look on Ash’s face in the pic, he really liked it! Quinn tasted my Ethiopian coffee and said it was good ððĪĶðŧ♀️.
Quinn finally got to visit a Spirit Halloween store that’s he’s seen a bunch of times on some shows he watches. Ash was enthralled with the huge skeleton.
I took the boys to the greenhouse in Hannibal to pick out some pumpkins. Quinn insisted on picking it up ðĪĶðŧ♀️.
Ash held onto that small one and even tried to take a bite ðĪĒ.
From the greenhouse, we took a drive up to Kiedasch Point. Ash fell asleep before we made it up there, but Quinn thought the view was cool.
We found these pieces for our pumpkins at Dollar Tree. Quinn is doing his best impression of it ð.
We didn’t grow any pumpkins this year but we do have some watermelons ripening in our garden. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t quite ripe when I picked it ðĨī. I am really bad at that. We had to weigh it because it was huge! It only weighed 4 pounds less than Ash ð.
We took another trip over to Hannibal to take pics in the sunflower field. They’re much shorter this year, but they’re beautiful!
ð
ð
ðð
ð ðĻðū
Our sunflowers are winding down at home.
We’ve had some of the prettiest visitors to them
And the coolest.
I’ve been obsessed with taking grasshopper pics ð
They’re just so weird looking
I’m fascinated.
ð
Quinn asked for a roll one day, but then decided not to eat it, so he put it on the sofa table. I told him he couldn’t leave it there because Sophie would eat it. He told me he protected it by putting my basket over it, upside down ððĪĶðŧ♀️. It worked to keep her from eating it while it was fresh, but she got it anyway once it turned rock hard from being left out ð.
Always hoping for an accidental food spill
ð ð
ð ð
When the boys go to sleep, she’s always wanting to hug on Philip and me.
Pile of paws ðð
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