One Man's Trash Is Another One's Treasure

As I've said before, I'm not that excited about Amanda being mobile. It's not that I don't like her to explore, it's just that she puts EVERYTHING into her mouth. Anything she can find. The weird part is the things she chooses to put in her mouth. Like most young children, she's not interested in the toys, that would be too easy. She looks for the tiniest scrap of anything she can find on the floor, and that's what she wants to taste. Let me just tell you, her fine motor skills are amazing.

For awhile her favorite thing to eat was the carpet. Sounds strange, but she would go to the point where the carpet meets the tile and she would pull up the strings from the carpet. These weren't loose strings, she would pull hard until they would come out and then stick them in her mouth. I was always fishing carpet out of her mouth. Now that she has a broader range and can move more, and faster - she's much quicker now than she was in that video I posted just last week, everything the kids drop or leave behind is available to be shoved into her mouth.

Last week I found some sticky mosaic in her poop. If you don't know what that is, it's little, tiny, square-shaped puffy stickers that when all put together on a stick-by-number sheet makes a picture. Sarah loves them, but she is horrible about picking them up and spilling them on the floor. Plus, they are so small it's easy to miss them. I'm not worried that Amanda is going to choke on them, it's just kind of gross.

Lately I have noticed that she doesn't swallow most of the stuff she sticks in her mouth. She sucks on it for a bit and then spits it out. Thankfully. Since we obviously aren't watching her as closely as we should, at least she is smart enough to spit most of the stuff out. Today was the kicker, at one point I asked Andy where she was and he said she was by the fireplace. When I looked at her I could tell something was in her mouth. When I went to check I found a rock from the fireplace in her mouth. They are tiny rocks, nothing that she could choke on, but still disgusting. I thought there was just the one but maybe 15 minutes later she spit out another one. Yuck. Again, lucky she would rather just suck on things than swallow them.

Andy never put that much in his mouth, and I don't remember it being a big issues with Sarah either, so this is kind of new to me. I know she'll get past it eventually, but right now it's a huge pain. You have to watch her so carefully. I spend most of my day sitting close to her to make sure she doesn't get into too much trouble. That leaves me verging on useless and makes the other two slightly annoyed. It's just one more thing we need to let her work out so we can once again lead normal, productive lives.