Life Lately

It’s been a couple months since I’ve checked in. Life with a toddler is BUSY! I won’t give you an exhaustive list of everything that has happened since Quinn turned the big O-N-E, but I’ll give you a snapshot of life as of late.

Quinn is definitely a little sponge. It amazes me what she understands! The other night Scott and I were talking at dinner and I made the comment that I was glad Quinn wasn’t screaming at the dinner table (we went through a phase), and as soon as I said “screaming”, she let out a big ole scream … then smiled. Stinker! We’re realizing that although she can’t say everything, she understands nearly everything we say.

As far as speech goes, I’d say she knows about 20-30 words not including people’s names. Some of her favorites are:

• Hello (heh-woah)
• Hi
• Bye Bye (followed with a “muuuuah” blowing a kiss)
• Up please (up peeese)
• Burp
• Baby (any time she sees a small child, she’s all “BABY!!”)
• No no (usually when she knows she’s doing something she’s not supposed to!)
• Bottle
• Book
• Eat (at)
• All done
• Ball
• Bubbles
• Outside (ahh-sigh)
• More (mo)
• Puppy (Puh-Pee!!!!!! … always said with exclamation!)
• Daniel Tiger (Dan-yo … her favorite TV show)
• Video (Bid-yo … she LOVES watching videos of herself on our phone)
• What’s this? (Dis? and holds something up she’s unsure about)
• Weeeee! (sliding in the tub or going down the slide)
• Pizza (I think this one comes from the pretend pizza at Mimi & Papa’s that she loves)

As for names, she mainly refers to Scott and I as “Mommy” and “Daddy”. She will sometimes use Mama or Dada, but lately she’s been trending towards Mommy/Daddy. She loves saying Murr-Murr which is my parent’s kitty Murray. She can say Mimi, Papa, La La (Wa Wa – for Aunt Lanie), Abbie and Cara. We’re trying LOTS of other names, but they have yet to stick. She tries, but it’s not always consistent. I’ve actually made a family ABC’s book for her that has a photo with the person’s name on each page. Hopefully this will help!

We also have found that Quinn is definitely a strong-willed child. Never would guess where THAT gene comes from! Whew. She’s pretty defiant and if you make her do something she doesn’t want to we get a super high-pitched scream followed with a full-on laying on the floor meltdown. Usually we ignore this, and we’re hoping as communication improves, these melt-downs improve too. Fingers crossed!

Overall she is a sweetheart. Within the last week or so she’ll walk over to me and give me a big hug and go “Awww momma”. Melt. My. Heart! She also loves it when we rub noses and then she puckers up and gives me a big kiss. I love it!! You can’t have a bad day when that happens! She’s definitely a hugger right now. It’s so sweet to see her hug her toys and go “Awwww” or when I’m cooking dinner in the kitchen and she hugs my legs. 🙂 [all the heart eye emojis]

She is very curious and always has to know what’s going on. Whether it’s our neighbor mowing, the neighbor boys playing outside, when we cook dinner, make coffee, do laundry, etc., I’ll hear her little diaper butt padding across the wood floors followed by “up peeeese!”

Eating is going pretty well. Cheerios are her spirit animal. She would definitely eat them ALL day if we let her. She loves grilled chicken and ground beef, sweet potato fries, broccoli and cauliflower, green beans, grapes, chips (she is the descendant of the Chip King, so no surprise here!) yogurt, applesauce and roasted potatoes. She’s warming up to pasta … finally!

We still give her a bottle right after dinner. Until the end of October, this still had breast milk in it since I needed to use up my stash. Mainly we’ve kept it up since I know she doesn’t drink a ton of milk during the day, so I’m trying to make sure she gets enough fluids, fat and nutrients since she will chug anything in a bottle. We also give her a liquid vitamin with iron that tastes heinous, so this helps smooth that over! At her last doctor appointment they told us she was low on iron, so we’re trying to get her hemoglobin levels back up.

Sleep is going good too. About once every 5-7 nights she’ll wake up, and we’ll need to go in and butt pat or change a diaper, but other than that, she goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up around 6:30 a.m.

And here’s a bunch of other random things from the past three months with a complete deluge of photos. 🙂

OUTSIDE

Quinn loves being outside. Even if it’s 30 degrees! We just bundle and go. During the weekends she’ll stand by the door and tug on the handle saying “Ahh-sigh, ahh-sigh. Bye bye. Muuuah!” Or she’ll fuss and cry while holding onto the jogging stroller saying “Up! Up!” Homegirl loves it.

We’ll usually venture to the park that’s only a couple blocks from the house, but she also LOVES the “big kid park” and going down the big slides.

We’ll also stick her in the Ergo and go on some hikes. She’s a wiggle worm, so we usually have to keep moving. 🙂

She also loves her little house that my cousin and his family gave to us. It’s bedecked for the holidays and she loves going in and out of the door and playing peek-a-boo.

CHRISTMAS

Speaking of decking the halls, we had a lot of fun this year festooning the house with all our Christmas decorations. At first the plan was to do all of this while Grizwold Jr. and her busy hands were fast asleep. However, we figured, might as well see how she does. And you guys!! It was the sweetest thing! She was such a good little helper.

She also loved helping outside. I think she could have played out there all day. 🙂

We call her Little Ralphie when she wears her pink sherpa winter suit.

I finally got with the program and ordered Quinn a stocking! I totally dropped the ball on it last year, so when Pottery Barn was having a sale along with free monogramming and shipping, I couldn’t pass it up!

I made our stockings about 4 years ago when we first bought our house. If craft mom wasn’t dead, I may have attempted it with Quinn’s, but the PB option was MUCH easier!

OCTOBER

October will always be one of my favorite months. Pumpkin and apple everything with riding boots and scarves and fire pits and cooler weather. Not to mention, our anniversary! In the middle of October we ventured over to the local pumpkin patch. We got there pretty early that morning, so we actually had the entire place to ourselves and Quinn could slap all the pumpkins she wanted.

We usually try to do some sort of getaway for our anniversary. Last year we just had a night out since Quinn was still pretty small. This year she stayed with my parents while Scott and I hung around STL for a couple days. It was a much needed break!

We also managed our annual “photo with our photo”.

That weekend also kicked off the Halloween festivities. Quinn participated in my hometown’s trick-or-treating since they held it the weekend before Halloween. She was Hoth Base Princess Leia complete with blaster gun. 🙂

We had lots of fun visiting my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles. On actual Halloween Quinn turned into a flamingo!

We let her go naked under her costume since it was 80 degrees outside! We also found out that she had a 102 fever. Four days of fever later we finally found out that she had Coxsackievirus. This is the virus that can manifest into Hand Foot and Mouth disease, but since she just had a couple spots in her mouth and on her bum, she really didn’t get full-blown HFM. Thankfully!

A week later she ended up with strep throat. Ugh! She hadn’t been to the doctor in almost 5 months for an illness, so twice in two weeks was enough. We also ended up switching pediatricians in the process and it was the best decision we’ve ever made!

So, almost 1,400 words and 30 photos later … that’s what’s been going on!

We can’t wait for Christmas this year. She’s at SUCH a fun age. We’re excited for her to open gifts, but also participate in some traditions that we want to start as a family. Hopefully it isn’t February before I share those with you.

Until then, Merry Christmas! And I’ll leave you with one final photo.

Homegirl loves her some kitty cats. 🙂

Adult Snow Day

Many of you probably have had your fair taste of winter weather this year. Yes, the cold gets old. Yes, driving in sleet and ice is terrible. However, sometimes your office calls and tells you not to come into work … and it is GLORIOUS … every. single. time. This is when I love winter. This doesn’t happen in the summer, for obvious reasons of course.

We received some pretty crazy weather last night. It started off with freezing rain which the weather people predicted to cause “wide-spread destruction!!!!”. Well, they were a little off and the freezing rain turned over to sleet (and lots of it) and then to this powdery white snow. All told we probably received about 5-6 inches of precipitation, which is actually a lot for where we live.

The roads by our house hadn’t even been touched by a snow plow, let alone any other vehicle. It was quite beautiful. The snow was still coming down pretty heavy when we woke up and we couldn’t resist to camp out in our jammies with a thick blanket and piping cup of coffee and just watch the snow. I could have done that all day.

Scott and I have lived in the South for about eight-ish years and we haven’t seen snow like this. Unfortunately for us, all our sleds and snow gear are up at my parent’s house, because let’s be real … snow never happens down here … in March.

After some texting with some of our good friends who were also off work, we decided to get together to play in the snow; because, again, this NEVER happens down here (okay that’s the last time I’ll say that).

One of my best friends lives a couple blocks away and has a decent hill by her house. She was totally up to layering on some clothes and snagging a couple Rubbermaid lids off some plastic tubs to test this hill out. So, Scott put on his snow-scraping face and we headed over.

Don’t mess with the husband. He’s pretty tough.

To cut to the chase, Rubbermaid lids are TERRIBLE for sledding. It was pretty sad. We ended up calling around to a couple local hardware stores and found one that had sleds. My inner child was fist pumping like crazy. Real sleds are worth the investment. Do not, and I repeat, do NOT waste your precious sledding time using Rubbermaid lids.

After we left the hardware store with our bright orange and blue sleds we headed over to the best hill in our town. It’s on the campus of the university and is usually covered in college kids. However, it was like 10:00 a.m. and that might as well be 6:00 a.m. to that crowd. Needless to say, it was empty. It was fresh, untouched snow. I didn’t think this snow day could get any better, and then it did.

I was the first one down the hill.

You can’t really tell, but this is actually pretty steep. You gain some pretty substantial speed sledding down this hill and it’s riddled with bumps and steel grates that will not hesitate to throw you off your sled. It’s perfect.

Perfect until your husband decides that he wants to ride down with you. “Okay husband! Sure!” Then you hit said bumps and get thrown from the sled and land hard on your butt and lay face-down in the snow with your pride incredibly bruised … and your butt. I would show you a photo of the butt bruise (it’s got all the colors right now), but this isn’t that kind of blog. 🙂

Thankfully our other friends joined up with us and we took a break from the big hill. We headed back to our friend’s house and took to her bunny slope hill.

We even got their Weimaraner to go down with Scott. Hahaha!

We eventually made it back over to the “big hill” for more butt-bruising fun. I think we were sledding for about three to four hours! We laughed so hard from all the wipeouts and crashes that the mascara ran down our faces and we scared the men and babies. It was a perfect snow day and we are thankful for good friends to share it with.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling the roads will be cleared tomorrow and it will be real life back at the office. Then again, this is the South and it might just snow next week, who knows.

That’s about it from our snowy side of the street. I hope you were able to pack in a sledding day this year!

– Allie