This Week

Quinn has had a pretty good week. She's sleeping in 2 4-hour chunks at night with some regularity (although, the night before last, she did think that bedtime was 2 am).

We went for a walk in the neighborhood yesterday.


She has no end of adorable clothing to wear, thanks to her many fans.


And, she's getting better and better at playing with things.


Not to mention other babies!


Make no mistake -- her hands are still the most interesting things around!

Rocking and Rolling

Ever since I started my Lenten blog, I haven't found time to post on this one. Since I get Sundays off from my Lenten discipline, here are some glimpses of Quinn's life lately.

Amy (her aunt) came back home from her a vacation in Mexico, which included celebrating Carnaval in Cozumel. Amy's taking her massage therapy licensing exam tomorrow. Go Amy!

Quinn also got to spend some quality time with her cousin Grace, who insisted, "I want to hold Baby Quinn!" Those of you who are lucky enough to have met Grace will notice that she has had her first haircut. She donated the hair to Locks of Love.

She also got to hang out with one of her baby friends, Harper (the 6-month old daughter of one of my favorite people). Quinn was actually kind of interested in looking at Harper for the first time this week.

In other baby news, Quinn finally seems to have mastered rolling from her back to her side -- she repeated it enough times that I actually caught it on camera...

...and, Quinn has inherited a "big girl swing" -- she sits up in it, unlike the other one, where she is in more of a lying-down position. She played happily in this thing (with her polyhedron toy) for about an hour today!



She's been more interested in sitting up in general -- she still needs to be propped up, but she does these cute little baby curls if you try to hold her in a reclining position.

So, to sum up: she's still cute!

Sadness

Lest you think that Quinn's life is all happiness and smiles, I wanted to share some photographic evidence to the contrary:



Actually, I think this face she makes is adorable (although sad). Believe it or not, I only managed to capture the less extreme version; she somehow manages to get the corners of her mouth all the way down to her chin.

Here are some things that have made Quinn sad recently: getting medicine on her neck (what neck, you say? well, that's the problem), which is supposed to happen twice a day, and Mama cutting the tip of her finger with the nail clippers. That was VERY sad.

Buy Nothing New Year

So, Tim and I thought that, between the two of us, we could probably keep one New Year's resolution this year, and so we decided to buy nothing new.

Inspired by a column in Sojourners by someone who had committed to a Buy Nothing New year in the same year they had their first child, I figured we could do it, too. The way I see it, there is already WAY too much stuff around, and we can easily get by with re-used things.

Climate change seems more real and scary every day, and this is one small way to reduce our impact, as well as a way (for me) to begin to wrestle with the massive disconnect between the haves and the have-nots, both in the U.S. and globally.

At the very least, it should make us consider carefully what we really need.

I think that all the "transgressions" (or "exceptions," depending on your point of view) so far have been mine. So far, it's been all baby things: a few (bisphenol-A free) bottles, which were probably necessary, and some cute organic cotton baby clothing, which definitely was not.

We're currently in a competition to see who can post our reflections first. I think I won. But Tim's is probably way smarter-sounding.