This post won't have any pictures because I am too dumb to figure out why my photo library won't open and I don't want to wait until tonight when Kelly gets home.
Anyways, Quincy is 18 months old today. And today is the day we have decided to take away her binkies. I am crying inside. I don't want to do it. But I know the longer we wait, the harder it will be. Or the longer we wait, the more it will screw up her teeth. One of those two should be motivation enough for doing it now. For most of her life she's only been allowed to have her binki in her crib. And, she only uses it to fall asleep, once she is asleep she spits it out and doesn't use it again. So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that tonight won't be too bad. I'm going to have her help me gather up all of the binkies and then I'm going to explain to her that she doesn't get them anymore. Last night, after I lay her down in her crib I told her that this was her last night, and then there'd be no more binkies. Well, she listens pretty darn good because about 30 minutes after I left her in her crib I heard her still awake and talking to herself. She started to get upset so I went in there and she had thrown all of her binkies out of the crib. I thought to myself that maybe we would start tonight but then after like 10 minutes of me sitting next to her crib trying to get her to calm down and her just rolling around all restless, I gave up and gave the binkies back to her and she went right to sleep.
She loves to color. She will sit in her high chair with some paper and some crayons and go to town for quite awhile. A few weeks ago I put up one of her first drawings on the fridge. It was just a bunch of colorful scribbles, obvs. It stayed up for a few weeks and then the other day, she walks over to it, pulls it off the fridge and then crumples it up and throws it in the garbage. Uh, guess that wasn't your best work there, Quinn? I'm pretty sure she ate a crayon yesterday. I left her unsupervised. I came back and she was coughing and scraping her tongue with her fingers and there was only a small part of the black crayon left on her tray. ... And no wrapper? She ate the paper too? I found part of the wrapper later on the ground and also another large chunk of black crayon so I think she didn't eat that much of it. Later that night, she was fake crying and I could see into her mouth and there was a piece of black crayon on the back of one of her teeth... yikes.
Speaking of weird things she has eaten, the other night we went out to Texas Roadhouse. She was really hungry and we had a bit of a wait so we gave her some peanuts, after cracking open the shell and extracting them first, of course. Well, she kept wanting to get the peanuts out of the bucket herself, so I let her. And then a few minutes later I noticed she was chewing on something. I hadn't given her anymore peanuts and neither had Kelly. We look in her hand and there is half of a peanut, as in half of the peanut shell with a whole peanut still inside. Sick. I can't remember for sure, but I tried to Kelly it was fine because I think I ate whole peanuts once when I was younger at one of those church Christmas parties where you sit on Santa's lap and then they give you a bag of peanuts and gross candy and an orange. I know I definitely ate the shells of sunflower seeds when I was little because I wanted to be cool and crack open the seed in my mouth like everybody else but I didn't know how so I'd just eat the whole thing. Anyways, back to the dinner, she later wanted another peanut and she tried to eat the shell again and this time, after chewing for a few minutes, starting coughing and trying to scrape her tongue with her fingers again. I had to swipe her mouth and get all the peanut shells out and we never gave her another peanut again.
She is talking more and more. Her latest word is "wow." She says "mommy" now instead of just mama. She says "no," "what's that," "who's that," "cheese," "fruit." When she wants something she says "THAT!" The other day, it was raining. I think this was the same day we were trying to go to Texas Roadhouse. We were headed out to the car and Quinn was following us, like she usually does, except she usually walks all the way to the car. This time she stopped on the sidewalk and just stood there, rain pouring down on her, hands above her head to touch the rain, saying over and over again, "what's that?" in her little high pitched voice.
Kelly: Come here, Quinn
Q: what's that?
Kelly: Come get in the car
Q: what's that?
Kelly: Come here!
Q: What's that?
And so it went for awhile before he finally just walked through the rain and got her.
In our bedroom, we have room darkening curtains that go all the way to the floor. Last week, Q discovered she loves to hide in these. The other night, she kept hiding in them and then popping out and yelling at Kelly, who would pretend to be scared and then she'd laugh her head off. She did this over and over again. We are pretty sure she could have done it all night. Literally.
She is a little copycat, which constantly has me thinking about setting a good example. Like, when she grows up and gets a smart phone is she just going to stare at it all the time like I do? I sometimes download books on my phone but then I feel bad for staring at it, even though I'm reading, because she can't tell whether i'm reading a book or on social media wasting my life. So I've resolved to go to the library and get real books. Plus the library is free and iPhone books are not. Books are her favorite thing ever I think. She gets really excited if I buy her a new one. She sits and reads to herself quite a bit, and I'd post a picture except for the reason I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Every night we read books before bed, and she wants to just keep reading. I make her stop after three books, because I don't want to read anymore. It's really cute though, I tell her to go pick a book and she goes over to her pile of books (I don't have a bookshelf so yes they are all in a pile), and she carefully decides which one she wants me to read. We bought her a little book about Jesus awhile ago, because I wanted to start teaching her about Him, but I wasn't sure how to go about it. Duh. Get a book about Him. She likes it, of course. She likes all books.
The whole reason I started talking about her being a copycat is because one day she surprised me and reached up into the bathroom drawer and pulled out a q-tip, stuck it in her ear for a second, and then walked over to the garbage and threw it away. Then she did it again, and again, and again. In the same ear. After like five q-tips I was like, ok, that's enough. I think your ears are clean now. And yes, I know that you're not supposed to clean your ears with q-tips because it will like push more wax in your ear and cause you to go deaf or something, whatevs. I like to clean my ears with a q-tip and I probably will until I go die. Or lose my hearing. Whichever comes first.
She doesn't limit the things that she sticks in her ears to just q-tips. She also puts bobby pins, hair brushes, chalk, and probably other things that I don't know about in her ear. Don't worry, I tell her not to. I don't know why she does this.
So, another issue she has, is her anger. Like she gets really mad. She will throw things and scream when she is frustrated. Last night she legit got in a fight with her dump truck. She kicked it and tossed it around and screamed at it for like five minutes straight. I'm not even kidding. I have it on video. I finally stopped her and held her and then she fake cried in my arms for about five minutes. When she fake cries, she just squeezes her eyes shut and makes crying noises and does weird things with her mouth. I think she thinks I think she is really crying. She didn't open her eyes for like five minutes. She just wailed. Drama.
I know that my fellow moms have all seen those pins on pinterest that are like "50 things to do with your toddler." I've looked at these before, and they are all like, "stack cups and then knock them over." ... boring. I'd rather watch TV and tell her to be quiet. Just kidding. So today, I looked at one of these for some new ideas. One of them said, "let them play with flour." The rest had you needed like weird craft objects like pipe cleaner which I didn't have so I'm like, ok, she can play with flour. I put her in her chair and pour a small amount of flour on a little cookie sheet and bring it over to her. I try to show her that she can trace shapes in it and run it through her fingers and stuff. They said this was good for her sensory development. Well, she hated it. Kept saying, "no, no, no." Ok fine, she doesn't want to develop her senses. The next thing on that website said, "mix flour with water in a plastic bag, they like to squish it" or something like this. So I dump the flour in a sandwich bag and add some water and make this squishy dough. She hates it. "No, no, no." I'm all, "look Quinn, you can squish it!" And she just keeps trying to give it back to me. Ugh. I just noticed some red solo cups in our kitchen, I guess we will try some stacking and knocking over here in a few.
She just got stuck under the chair I am sitting on because she tried to crawl under it. It is one of those metal folding chairs. She also got stuck in her dresser the other day. Her dresser isn't really a dresser, it's one of those things that has wooden slots for those fabric cubby things. She pulled out one of her cubbies and then crawled into the open space. She crawled in face first and was squatting inside of it, and then she tried to back up and her head kept hitting the top. She tried to sit down but her head kept hitting the top again, so she started crying and I went in there and pulled her feet out from under her so her head wouldn't hit and removed her.
We took her camping two weeks ago. She loved it. My whole family was there and she loved everybody there. She got super dirty every day. We were camped on a hill and she loved to walk up the hill and then run down, sure to step on all the big rocks that poked up out of the dirt. She hated the lake. Probably because it was cold. I decided one day I had to take her on the jet ski, even though she screamed every time we took her close to the water. So I held her and waded her out to the jet ski while she screamed her head off, and we stuck her on there and she was still screaming. Everyone was like, "I think she hates that" and I was like, "me too." But then I got on there behind her and I started the engine and she immediately stopped crying. I took her for a ride and she loved it. She wasn't smiling, but I think that's because the life jacket sort of squished her face. After that she didn't hate the lake as much.
Right now she is pretty desperate for attention, she is being pretty naughty and getting into stuff she knows she is not supposed to, so I'm gonna wrap this up. She is 25 lbs in case anyone is wondering. She makes me laugh and I love her more every day. She has her purse around her neck right now, and it's things like this that just make me smile. It's hard to understand what's so special about raising a child until you've done it yourself. It is so amazing to watch something so innocent and pure discover her world. I saw a quote the other day that said, "Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?" I think I've been treating it like a spare tire lately and I need to start using it as my steering wheel because I cannot possibly teach her everything she needs to know on my own. And now I have a royal mess to clean up so, until next time!
