16-18 Months

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! 

14-15 Months

Quincy is 15 months old. She has learned so much so fast. She almost always knows what we are saying to her. I ask her if she's hungry, and she runs over to her high chair. Or, if she is hungry she goes over there and asks to be put in. She knows what it means if I tell her we are going outside, or that she needs a bath, time to brush her teeth, or if I tell her it's time for bed. She always grabs my purse when we are getting ready to leave the house. 

She knows where things go around the house and she loves to help. If she finds garbage on the floor, she will pick it up and go over to the garbage can and try to throw it away (it's bigger than she is). She loves to clean up her toys. This is not something that I taught her or tried to teach her. She just likes to organize things. When she doesn't want to finish her food, she puts the food in the cupholder of the tray in her high chair. If I ignore her for too long, she throws it on the ground. I always find her binkies in weird places, she puts them in drawers throughout the house. She loves to store things in the side of our bed between the frame and the mattress. The other day I could not find one of her shirts anywhere, I was so confused. Then I found it in the side of the bed along with a bunch of her books, socks, and binkies. I have to keep buying more binkies because they disappear. She has a little suitcase that she got for Christmas and she loves pulling it around. She also tries to climb on top of it. She loves climbing, she always tries to climb on top of the dishwasher lid. 

Underneath her is her baby doll and a book. 

She loves her baby, I always ask her where her baby is and she goes and finds her and then talks in a really high pitched voice and hugs her. 

She talks all the time, but not in English. She will look right in my eyes and jabber stuff and I respond to her and she'll walk away. Then she comes back and says the same thing and I just tell her 'ok' and she looks happy and continues playing. She does say a few words. One of her most frequent phrases for awhile was "what's that?" She would point at everything and ask what's that? She also says "mama" and "no." She says "no" at times that don't really make sense. But if she really doesn't want something, she will shake her head back and forth and wave her arms in front of her really fast. 

Yesterday, I was moving laundry and she always watches me. If I dropped a sock, she picked it up and put it in the basket for me. When I was done, she tried to pick up the basket full of clothes. She knows whether certain foods go in the freezer or the fridge. If I have chicken out and I go to put some back in the freezer, she runs over to the freezer door. 

She always eats crumbs out of her high chair. If she's just playing in the kitchen, she will go over to her high chair and reach for crumbs. Or she eats them off the ground. She's actually eating something she found on the ground right now. 

She went through a phase where she was obsessed with books. I got her books for Easter and she was so excited. She would bring over a book to Kelly or I multiple times a day and yell at us until we read it. She knows if we don't read what the page says too, she will stay on the certain page until we read the words. I've tried to make stuff up before because I'd get sick of reading the same thing over and over. I bought those books for her but they were really a gift for myself so I'd have something new to read. I got sick of them pretty fast though. Then just last week she stopped begging me to read books multiple times a day. We still read before bedtime and she likes it. She always tries to turn the pages though before I'm done reading each one. 

She gives kisses by tapping her face to your face. She will wave sometimes. The only time she really waves is to the old people that sit behind us in the bench at church. She waves at them all the time and they wave back at her. 

She loves to wear things around her neck. If it's long enough, it goes around her neck. Kelly's belt, my pajama pants, and other ribbons have all been one of her scarves. She does this basically every day. 

She is starting to get some independence, she doesn't want us to help her do certain things. We were eating out at a restaurant and we kept trying to help her with her kid's cup so she wouldn't tip it over too far and spill it, and she was pretty mad and yanked it back away from us. I am trying to let her learn to use a spoon. I give her applesauce and yogurt and leave her with a spoon. She just like taps it into the food and then licks it off. She gets frustrated after awhile and asks me to help her eat it. I probably should have started letting her try to use a spoon sooner. 

Every day we are thankful that we are her parents. We love her to pieces. 

13 Month Update

I want to keep updating this blog at least once a month, but now that Quinn is one, I need to come up with titles for my posts because I think it'd be annoying if I kept doing what I was doing and named this one "13 months." 

Quincy is so funny. I love playing with her every day. She loves books lately. She will come over to me many times throughout the day carrying a book because she wants me to read it to her. Or she just wants to sit and turn the pages. Sometimes she lets me read it in the order it's supposed to go, but she always tries to turn the pages before I'm done reading each page. Other times she will just flip to a page and she wants me to read what's on it. I end up reading the same pages over and over again. 

It seems she always wants me to be involved in what she is doing. If she's reading she is sitting on my lap most of the time. Today I was laying on the ground on my stomach and she came over with a book and she wanted to be on my lap but I didn't have a lap so she sat on my arm. And then she kept trying to sit on my back but she would tip over and fall off, it was so funny. 

She says the word "no" sometimes. And that's about the only word she says other than "mama." I know she knows what I'm saying sometimes. If I tell her to get in the bath she knows that we are going upstairs. If I tell her we are going outside she walks over to the door. She loves to go outside. She likes to walk up and down the sidewalk in front of our apartment. She likes the slides at the park, but she doesn't know how to get up to the them so I end up just picking her up and putting her on them over and over again until I get tired of it and then I take her somewhere else in the park. 

She is pretty good at communicating what she wants. She points to things and she has her own little words for certain things. I feel like her and I have our own little inside jokes. Sometimes she'll look at me with her lips pursed and she breathes really fast in and out of her nose. And I'll do the same thing back to her. Or I can start and she'll copy me and we both laugh. She dances by shaking her head back and forth to music. 

She used to love blueberries. We would buy a frozen bag of blueberries at Costco just for her and she would eat them every morning with breakfast. Last week she decided she didn't want any more blueberries. I've cut them up and put them in her Kodiak Power Cakes (if you haven't tried these you should get them, they are healthy protein waffle/pancake mix). I think I may try to sneak other fruit in her by putting them in her pancakes because I have a hard time getting her to eat enough fruits and veggies. She'll try any food but she doesn't always like it. 

If you are a guy probably don't read this next part. She has been weaned from nursing for about a month now. I know that just a few months ago I wrote about how sad I would be when she was no longer nursing, and I thought I would be. I thought I would keep doing it through the spring at least. Then the week that she turned one I got a plugged duct, twice. She was only nursing twice a day and I was surprised and annoyed that I got a block. I've had mastitis like four times and suddenly I just decided I was done. I didn't want to nurse anymore. I wrestled with it for a couple of days, I knew how good it was for her and how it helps her immune system. I did want to lose a few more pounds though and I worried that breastfeeding was keeping me from losing the last couple. I have been doing the 12 week challenge at the gym since January. I now weigh 3-4 pounds less than I did when I got pregnant. I think it is possible to lose all the weight when you're breastfeeding I just didn't decide to be disciplined enough to make it happen. There was a little voice in my head that kept telling me I could eat extra calories because I was nursing. Anyways, I cut back from two feedings a day to one and we did that for a couple of days. At first I thought my boobs would explode for a day or two but then it was fine so I cut back to nursing once every other day. We did that for four days. Again it was painful for a day but then it got better. So I did every two days for a week and then I just stopped nursing completely. My boobs did ache for awhile after I quit but they weren't getting full of milk like they had been. I am STILL making milk... but hardly any. Apparently it takes forever for your body to stop producing. I had to get a new bra. Let me just say, they are way different than before I got pregnant. None of my old bras fit. Which sucks because I had just gotten some nice ones right before I got pregnant. I went and got fitted and I went from a 34 to a 36. Pregnancy made my ribcage wider. I really did love nursing though, and I'm grateful I was able to do it. 

Squatting is the best position for reading.

 Um yes, her room is a disaster. I hate cleaning it because she goes in there and just takes everything out of its place. She takes the dirty clothes out, pulls all her cubbies out, etc. I bought her this bikini at Target and it is SO CUTE! No, I don't think it's immodest for babies to wear bikinis. She is a baby. She could be in a diaper and no one would care. 

 Her belly!! 

 She has chocolate on her face.

 We had stake conference last week, and regional conference two weeks before that, so we just go straight into the multi-purpose room at church and turn on the speaker. We can't get through a Sacrament meeting unless we get a bench to keep her contained. If we're in the back on metal chairs, forget it. It's not happening. 

She's sitting in her stroller, which was obviously made for her to sit in. You can't tell, but her baby is underneath her. Smh.

 She was trying to climb in it and the stroller rolled away from her somehow.

She got stuck like this, her leg was hooked on part of it and it was rolling away from her pulling her into the splits, hahaha. 

Sometimes she gets mad that she is trapped in the family room and I am in the kitchen, and she yells and also presses her mouth and nose against the bar. 

She is just silly. She loves to color. She found a pen one day and she kept trying to write on a piece of paper she had found, I didn't even know she knew that pens write on paper. We will have to get her a coloring book and some crayons. 

I can't think of a title for this post. Is it more dumb if I call it "The Last Month and a Half" or "13 months?" 

One

My baby turned one yesterday! It's so strange to think about how much she has changed in one year. I can so clearly remember the days leading up to her birth, and the days just after. She was so so tiny when she was born and now she is walking and into just about everything she can get her hands on. 

She is 29" tall, 45th percentile. She weighs 21 lbs 7 oz, 74th percentile. I was surprised to see that weight today at the doctor's office because we were just in last week to check on her ears and she was 20 lbs 13 oz. She is about to outgrow her carseat! Her head circumference is 47.2 cm, 95th percentile. Her head just keeps getting bigger, the percentile keeps increasing. I'm sure her body will catch up with it one day. 

She loves string cheese, teddy grahams, and fruit. She loves frozen blueberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, honey dew, and grapes.  I know you aren't supposed to give them grapes because they can choke but we only gave her tiny ones and she seriously has a mouth full of teeth. She's got her front four on top and bottom and she has four molars that have come in with I think a couple more cutting through. It is so hard to brush those dang teeth though. She hates it. It takes both Kelly and I to hold her down. They get pretty gross though because I forget to do it more often than I remember. I need to get on it though or else this girl will have a mouthful of cavities! And gross teeth, which is just embarrassing. She wants to eat whatever we are eating. If she has something on her tray and it's not the same thing we have on our plates, she yells at us because she wants what we have. If she doesn't like something she tries, she spits it out and then hands it to me. So nice. I love chewed up food. 

When she is done eating she puts her food in the cup holder spot and then yells at us. Yes, those are boy pajamas she is wearing in that picture. My mom had some in her size at her house that were brand new, and the more pajamas she has, the less laundry I have to do so I put them on her regularly. 

She likes to play outside. I took her to the park a couple of times because the weather has been really warm lately. The first time I took her she wouldn't get off of my lap for the first twenty minutes. I tried putting her in the swings, because she loved them when she was 8 months old, and she screamed. So we just sat until she finally decided she was ready to venture off my lap. She found a stick and then brought it back to me and sat on my lap to play with it. Eventually she was roaming all over the park and when we had to leave she got pretty mad. The next time I took her there she was happy to get off of my lap much quicker than the first time. 

Lately she has loved containers. Cardboard boxes, tupperware, totes, you name it. She loves to put things in them. She cleaned up our whole living room the other day because there was a cardboard box from Costco. She put all of her toys in it. Sometimes she takes her toys back out and then puts them back in. 

This is a box she filled up last night with some cool stuff like my shoe and Kelly's belt. A lot of times she tries to pick up her boxes full of things but they are usually about as big as she is and so she gets mad and screams because she's frustrated that she can't pick them up. 

She always brings us things. Today at the doctor's office she brought me all the books and magazines in the waiting room one by one. I said "thank you" each time she brought me one. When she had brought them all to me she took some back and then brought them back to me again. Then when the doctor came in she brought the doctor all of the books. Sometimes she brings me her toys and then looks at me like she's expecting me to do something and I don't know what she wants so I just throw it across the room and she goes and gets it and brings it back. Maybe that's what she wants?? I do not know. 

Another thing she loves to do is turn the pages of books. Before bedtime we read a story and she loves to turn each page. Luckily there aren't very many words on the pages of the books we read because she gets in a real hurry to turn each page. She brings us books and we just hold them up for her so she can turn each page. She does it over and over again, multiple times a day. 

She likes to "help" with things. Yesterday I was moving the laundry and she started putting all the clean clothes back into the dryer while I was throwing the wet ones in. I tell her thanks because I want her to keep trying to help me even when it's not helping. She loves the dishwasher but I don't let her help with that at all. 

Her favorite show is called "The Notekins." It's from a baby channel. When I have to leave her so I can shower or something I put that show on for her. She still gets mad at me for leaving though. She never really sits and watches anything for more than 20 minutes unless she has just woken up or she is about to go to sleep. She is usually on the move! She loves dancing. She shakes her head back and forth or sometimes she bounces her knees up and down if a song comes on. It's so cute. Sometimes she just bangs her head on stuff though. It's kind of weird. At church last week she was sitting on the ground and she kept banging her head against the back of the pew on purpose. She does it against the wall sometimes or the back of the couch. She doesn't do it super hard or anything, but I don't get it. 

Last night I was in my bedroom when I heard a loud noise coming from her room. I went to go see what she was doing and she had grabbed the lamp off of her little table and was carrying it around. Then today she was still fascinated by it and she sat and played with it.

This last year has been the best year of our lives! We love our little family so much. When I think back on those days right after she was born, it's crazy to think of how much personality she has now. She is so silly and she makes me laugh every day. I love spending my days with her.

11 Months

Quincy turned 11 months old a couple days ago. All I can think about it how I am about to have a one year old! It was around this time last year that I can vividly remember being pregnant and counting down to the day I would finally have my baby. Anyways, it goes by fast, everyone already knows that. It goes by in a blur too, I hardly remember anything clearly other than the first few weeks after we brought her home. Time just flew by in a sleep-deprived blur of events. I'm glad I've taken the time to write things down at least once a month because you think you will remember, but you won't!!!

She started walking on January 6th. One month after she took her first steps. That day she wouldn't let me sit her down she had to stay standing and she kept taking steps over and over. She's gotten better every day since! I think it was that same day that she refused to let me feed her. Not even from her beloved baby food pouches. I just bought some of the reusable ones a month ago and I was pretty pleased with myself, thinking how handy they would be. They were pretty nice to have for about three weeks. So then I had to try to figure out how to get her to eat healthy things that she could feed herself, because mostly she just wanted teddy grahams. I make her smoothies with soy milk and frozen fruit. We've also discovered that she likes toast, grilled cheese, scrambled eggs, and she LOVES vanilla soy milk. I tasted it, I don't think it's very good, but she gulps it down fast. She insists on eating whatever mom and dad are eating. If we have something different than she does on her tray, then she yells at us until we give her some of our food. She doesn't always like it, but she has to be given the option of tasting it I guess. I have a cute picture of her eating lasagna but my pictures are having trouble uploading so I may have to come back and add them to this post later. When do babies start using a spoon? I give her one, and she just moves it out of her way. 

Quinn loves to play peek-a-boo. She'll start playing it multiple times throughout the day. She ducks her head down with a little smirk on her face, and then pops her head up with a huge smile. I love it. I always try to stop what I'm doing if she wants to play peek-a-boo for a minute. She's become much more cuddly. She lays her head on my shoulder often throughout the day. I have to sit on the floor if I'm going to be in the same room with her, because she always comes over to sit on my lap for about two seconds before going off to play again. She gets kind of mad if I'm on the couch where she can't get to me. She always tries to bring her toys over to me so she can sit on my lap and play with them, no matter how big they are. She'll drag a laundry basket across the room to be closer to me while she plays with it. She clicks her tongue all the time, and loves if you do it back to her.

She's getting so silly. The other night she was taking a bath and she always wants to play with my big shampoo and conditioner bottles. They are almost as big as she is, but she likes to lift them up and then she lowers one over the side of the tub until it just touches the floor, and then she pulls it back in. I don't know why. 

It's been terrible trying to change her diaper most of the time. Or get her dressed. She hates laying down on the changing table. I have to find things for her to play with or else I end up sitting on her on the floor while she kicks her legs and I try to strap her diaper on straight. It's a workout. 

She has been sleeping through the night pretty consistently since we got back from Washington. Her schedule totally changed after we went there, she goes to bed around 9:00 and wakes up around 8:30. I like it better than waking up at 7:00, that's for sure. She still wakes up around 7:00 in the morning but I go in she nurses and then falls back to sleep for awhile longer. I can actually get up and get things done before she is up. I could have done that before but I didn't want to. We were playing downstairs a couple of days ago and she crawled over to the gate at the bottom of the stairs and started whining. So I opened it and she crawled up the stairs and right into her bedroom and she grabbed a binki. So I put her in her crib and when I closed the door she was just sitting in her crib, but she took a nap! I couldn't believe it. Maybe she has more of me in her than we thought. I loved sleep as a child, and I still do. Since then she's been napping without nursing first, and she goes down pretty easily. It's nice. Speaking of nursing though, I'm having mixed feelings about weaning her. She really only nurses about 2-3 times in a 24 hour period now. I really love nursing, there is something so sweet about it. I also love that it helps her immune system right now when there are so many things going around. However, she has had eight teeth for a couple of months now and they are pretty long so it's not always that comfortable anymore. I don't know when exactly I'll wean her. I know that I will miss it though when I do. She just got four molars this week too. I try to brush her teeth but I forget a lot and also she hates it. 

She loves going to the Kid's Klub at Gold's. She gets really excited when we walk up to the door. She whines at me when I leave but she's always happy when I come and pick her up. I was watching the video monitor today while I was working out and I saw another little girl hugging her and bringing her toys, it was so cute!! I got hired to teach PiYo at Gold's. I start this coming Monday. I'll be teaching at 6:15 am. Time to become a morning person!! I'm really excited to be teaching again, and to get to work with some people that I know will make me better at what I love doing! 

We feel very blessed! I don't know how life could get much better than this. :) 

10 Months

Quincy turned 10 months old two days ago. She likes to get creative while riding in the shopping cart. 

She took her first steps a few days ago!! I was super excited. She has been able to stand unassisted for a couple of weeks now. She stood up and I let go of her and scooted away and then she took three or four steps toward me. She hasn't done it since. She thinks it's really funny to stand up and have me scoot away from her and she just laughs and flaps her arms until she falls over. She must be trying to fly. She can bend over and pick things up and still stand back up but she won't take anymore steps! She likes to climb up the stairs. She hasn't figured out that she can't go down them face first though. She always stands up in the bathtub to try and play with the spout and I keep telling her no but she doesn't care. She does it over and over again after I pull her down and tell her to sit, and then she gets really mad and I take her out. Bath time used to be pleasant and easy, but this week it hasn't been! 

It's so fun to watch her figure things out. I stacked two of her toys on top of each other and then I watched her try to do the same thing. She kept missing but it was so fun that she was trying to do what I had shown her. I even caught a few hours later trying to stack some of her other toys. We need to get her some blocks so she can learn to build towers. 

She loves to drink out of my water bottle still. Kelly went and bought her her own cute little camelbak. It's purple with pink butterflies. She still chooses my water bottle over hers though for some reason. It's as big as she is! She learned to drink from a straw really well after we gave her some baby food pouches. Now she drinks a ton of water. She likes to take a drink after every bite of food it seems. She just sits in her high chair and sucks on her straw until she has to stop and pant and catch her breath. Then she does it again. She's so cute when she drinks from a straw. She furrows her eyebrows and her cheeks suck in and out. I need to take a picture because I seriously love her face when she does it. Kelly gave her a drink of mountain dew at Costco the other day. She liked it obviously. Here she is trying to find it. 

She loves to empty out drawers. She doesn't even look at what she's taking out half the time, she just throws everything behind her. I clean up the same messes multiple times a day. She gets in the bathroom drawers every day when I'm trying to get ready. It's better than having her get into the toilet paper or the toilet. She also likes to play in the shower curtains. 

She has gotten a lot more talkative. She yells a lot when she's doing something she likes. I picked her up from the Kids Klub at the gym the other day and she was going nuts playing with a toy kitchen. She was opening and closing the cupboards and banging on it and screaming super loud. They told me she does it all the time. Sometimes I catch her doing it on the TV monitors they have around the gym that are hooked up to the cameras in the Kids Klub. 

The other day Kelly walked in the door from work and she said "dad!" She gets really excited to see him. She knows it's him coming in when she hears the front door. She's also a lot more snuggly than she used to be. She'll lay her head on down on us for a few seconds at a time. Never for more than a minute, but that's a lot more than she used to do! She'll sit on our laps if we're watching the baby channel on TV. Those shows are seriously so weird but she likes them for some reason. 

She has been sleeping through the night for this whole week. For about six weeks she was waking up every 2-3 hours and crying until I came in and rocked her back to sleep and I got tired of it. So at first I tried letting her cry again which helped a little. I'd let her cry until she got really upset and then I'd go back in and give her her binki and she'd calm down and go back to sleep. What made the big difference I think was that I no longer nursed her in her room before nap time or bed time with the lights off and her blanket and her binki close by. I leave all the lights on so she wakes back up when she's done and then I lay her in her crib and give her her binki and her blanket. Then I turn the lights off and walk out. That made a huge difference. She still wakes up around 5 or 6 and I let her nurse and then she's usually up for the day by 7. She takes a short nap around 9 and then a longer one at 1:30 and then goes back to bed at 7 at night. I can lay her down for her first nap without rocking her at all and she usually goes to sleep on her own. I love sleep. 

She knows what "no" means and she understands "come here." She forgets quickly though and has to be reminded every few seconds not to do something or that she needs to come here, haha. I can't believe how much she has changed in ten short months. People told me that pregnancy would go by fast, it did not. After the baby comes out, that's when time flies! Being parents is the best. 

9 Months

I am so not on the ball! Quincy turned 9 months old last Tuesday! It's not like I'm super busy or anything, it's the fact that when I know I need to do something on a certain day or by a certain time, it kind of feels like homework so I put it off. It's pathetic, I know. That gives you an idea of what I was like in college. And high school, and all school, ever. 

That's me three days before Quincy was born. I thought it'd be fun to compare 9 months in, and 9 months out!! I can't believe she's actually been with me for 18 months. 5 weeks post conception, the baby's heart starts to beat. Her little heart has been beating for a year and a half!! Amazing. 

As Quincy grows, she just gets more fun!! Her little personality is so funny to me. She is very busy! She follows me all over the house. We put gates up to block her off from the kitchen and the stairs, but man she really loves the kitchen. If I have the dishwasher open, she wants to grab all the dishes out. So I either shut her out of the kitchen or give her snacks and leave her in her high chair. She LOVES taking everything out of the drawers in the kitchen. She used to only empty out the bottom one, but now she's figured out how to get to the next one up. So I clean up the kitchen like three times a day. I could just shut her out but she is learning and it's fun to watch her. She also loves the bathroom drawers. Long gone are the days I could go to the bathroom in peace. If I shut the door, she cries because she feels left out or something. If I leave it open, she crawls right up to me and stands up right in front of me banging her hands on my knees and stares at me. I just feel like I shouldn't be looking into someone's face that closely while I'm going to the bathroom. She always heads for nasty stuff in the bathroom like the plunger and the garbage. So gross. I spray everything with 409 regularly just in case she sneaks past me and gets to it. 

She likes to crawl even in the bathtub. The bath toys I gave her aren't enough, she needs to get to my shampoo. She even stands up in the bathtub, and in shopping carts. So now she rides in the basket of the cart most of the time. 

She likes to help with the laundry too, by pulling all of the clothes out of the basket piece by piece. The other day, I was folding laundry and she was on the ground, pulling all the clothes out and she started playing peekaboo with me! I've never really played it with her, but she had a shirt or something and she would hold it up in front of her face and then pull it down and smile. She did it like twenty times in a row. Now she does it at least once a day with random objects like my cell phone. I have an iPhone 6 so it does pretty much cover her whole face, haha.

She walks along the furniture pretty well now. For the last month or so she wouldn't go around the corners of the coffee table, but Kelly kept trying to lure her around them by placing his phone just out of her reach until she would go around the corner. After a day or two she did it. Once she got it, the next day she just kept smiling and doing laps around the coffee table, it was so cute!! She was very excited once she realized she could do it. 

We took a little family vacation to SunValley, ID this last weekend. We just wanted to get away for the weekend, and we'd never been to Sun Valley so we thought we'd go see what it was all about. We planned our trip a few months ago. We knew we wanted to take a vacation this fall, and our plan is to try to do something at least once a year. Doing stuff together as a family is what makes memories, and keeps you close together, I think. So I hope we always get to have fun and that our family will always enjoy going places and doing things together. 

 That was my hat when I was a baby :)

It was really cold there!! We stayed at the Tamarack Lodge in Ketchum, and it was right in the middle of everything so we just walked most places we wanted to go to. But it was 5 degrees on Saturday morning, and I asked Kelly if it was child abuse or something to have Quinn in the stroller while it was that cold! She was pretty bundled up, but my face was numb so hers probably was too, although she never indicated if it was bothering her. Then I saw a few other people with their babies in strollers and I didn't feel bad anymore. The people there live a different lifestyle compared to the one we live in Pocatello! The other strollers I saw were super fancy jogging strollers, probably with a leather hand grab, and we had a plain old Graco stroller. How embarrassing. Just kidding, our stroller is great. We went into a few stores and in one of them was a little girl who was probably two and she was wearing Uggs. Quinn was wearing little boots from Kmart, they were $12.99. Later, we were in a restaurant and it was kind of dark and a lady was like, "oh, your baby's little Uggs are so cute!" I guess they just assume? I don't have anything against Uggs. I just don't want to spend $100+ on shoes when they grow out of them after one season. We went to breakfast one morning and there was a little family in front of us waiting to order. They had a little boy and then a tiny baby asleep in her carseat. The mom was super skinny. I could hardly believe she had a baby that young. Then she ordered kale with quinoa for breakfast. I got a cinnamon roll with a burrito, haha. Which tells you everything you need to know about why I look the way I do, haha. Anyways, Sun Valley is beautiful. I'd love to go back when it's warmer and do some hiking or something. 

I saw Quinn start dancing for the first time today. A commercial came on with a song and she started waving her arms up and down with a smile on her face. It was so cute!! 

Also, she totally knows what the word "no" means. She usually stops what she's doing when I say it, but then looks up at me and jabbers something, and then she starts to do it again. 

She is much more coordinated. She can pick up cheerios and eat them all by herself! 

She says "mama" a lot now, or she says "mamamamamama" or "mahhhhmm!" I think she knows what it means. Even if she doesn't, it's still so cute to have her crawl up to me saying it. She allows us to hold her a lot more than she used to. She will sit on my or Kelly's lap and watch TV for a little bit, or play with a toy. She used to never sit still. Also, she needs me to sing her to sleep quite often now. It calms her down. Nothing used to calm that child down. I sing two songs to her, one is called "Angel Lullaby" and my grandma used to sing it to me when I was little. The other one is called "What Heaven Sees In You." It's an EFY song. I used to listen to it while I was pregnant and cry my eyes out. Sometimes I still tear up while I sing it to my sweet little girl, but it just represents everything that I want for my baby. I hope she remembers the lyrics of the song long after she gets too big for me to sing her to sleep and that they help her make the right choices so that she can be happy. 

When Quinn was born, both of her tear ducts were clogged. One cleared up pretty quick, the other stayed plugged until about a month ago. It finally cleared up. And then she got a cold, and both of her eyes got pretty goopy again. One cleared up after a week, but the other wasn't- the same one that had just recently unclogged. Then her eye started swelling up and it was so goopy she couldn't open it in the mornings. I took her to the doctor and she had an ear infection in one, with one starting in the other, and her eye was infected. They put her on augmentin to kill the infection and unfortunately that gave her diarrhea. I had to clean up blowouts almost daily for the first time since she was a newborn. Not fun. Especially now that she is mobile and her poop can get places. Her eye looked better the day after we started her antibiotics though. It's completely cleared up now. I think they upset her tummy because she's been waking up twice during the night. I had my first night of uninterrupted sleep the day she turned 9 months old, but she hasn't done it since because that next day she started the antibiotics. Today is the last day of them so I'm hoping for more nights of uninterrupted sleep soon! 

An update on me, I guess it really does take 9 months for your body to get back to the way it was. Obviously everyone is different but I finally am feeling like myself again. I've noticed little things are back to the way they used to be before I ever became pregnant. Like my voice isn't as nasally. It's nice. And I don't get as angry, haha. I lost five more pounds last month without really changing much about the way I work out or eat. Quinn's nursing slowed down quite a bit so I guess my hormones finally decided they'd let my body let go of a little more fat. So now I'm 3-4 lbs away from my pre-pregnancy weight. Also I fit back into my old skinny jeans. Things still aren't the same though, my hips are probably just permanently wider. It is what it is! I feel really good. 

We are all doing great!! Just living and loving life :)