"Hi, my name is Lincoln, and THIS is my spot."

Lincoln’s favorite spot—a wooden stool placed at the corner cabinet so he can “supervise” mom with all the sharp objects on her limited counter space.  Today’s supervision requires a cheese grater, and a giant Costco-size brick of cheese.   He struggles to lift the brick to the goal destination of the grater.  After much effort (and grunting), he lifts the cheese into the vicinity of the grater.  He thumps the brick on the counter, and takes a deep breath as he prepares for his reward of grated cheese.  Up goes the grater…hmmm no cheese? Repeat the steps again and again.  Still no cheese.  One more time just to be sure.  Then he sees the plate of already grated cheese…now it’s time to problem solve.  He takes a handful of the cheese, and secretively places it under the grater.  Lift the brick, thunk it down, and look underneath.  “THERE IT IS!”

We just celebrated Linc's second birthday, so I decided to make a list things he’s problem solved

• ·         Mom will change your bum a lot faster if you pull at your pants and say, “poopy.” (Just don’t confuse this word with “puppy.”)

• ·         If mom takes your candy away, don’t cry, just ask for “Wendy.”

• ·         Purposely lose the red heart that goes to the ball with different shaped holes.  The heart is a pain--Dad says it only has one axis of symmetry.  However, if you push hard enough most the shapes will fit in the hexagon hole…

• ·         If you want mom to rerun the scene with the train from Toy Story, find the remote and take it to her.  Things go faster that way.

• ·         You can hold multiple balloons at the same time if you grab them by their belly button.

• ·         Just because Nemo is on your Little Swimmer diaper, does not mean that it will play Nemo on the TV once placed in the DVD player

• ·         Getting toys out the crib is a monkey trap

• ·         Screaming “MOM” does not get Mom’s attention…”UH-OH” works much better. ( As a result Linc uses “uh-oh” similar to how teenagers use “like.”)

• ·         If you see an arrow, make your finger follow it…especially if it’s a button on an ipod because that unlocks all kinds of possibities.

• ·         If you want to go “Bye, bye” walk around the house: look for your hat with your hands on your head, find your shoes, find a coat, wear a belt on the outside of the coat, and turn off all the lights.  Then get impatient when your parents aren’t ready.

• ·         It is impossible to get your feet “unstuck” from the feetsie jammies

• Story time in mom and dad's bed is the best time of the day.

December

We tried to start December off right by taking Lincoln to go see Santa Claus.  Here's the best picture we got:

Not unlike many children, Lincoln wasn't too keen on the idea of going to see a large unfamiliar man with a beard all dressed in red.  Well, see for yourself:

If you noticed, Lincoln had no problem taking candy from the stranger though (we may have failed as parents on that front but, the relatively recent Halloween experiences didn't help us much).

Christmas was lots of fun.  We stayed home and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and took almost no pictures.  Here's the only good one:

Frog hat from Grandpa, trains from Grandma, riding on Mom's lap on my way to Wendy's house on Christmas morning.  It doesn't get better (Wendy lives less than a mile away, don't turn us into social services please).
We did take a video of Christmas morning though when Lincoln came out to see what Santa brought him (it's kind of long, we won't feel bad if you don't watch the whole thing).

For New Years we took a trip up to Idaho to visit Grandma and Grandpa and play with long lost cousins.  Hopefully, someone else got some pictures of the cousins together because apparently we didn't...  Here's what we got:

 Sledding

 Cold

 Still cold

 If you're thinking to yourself, that looks cold, you've got a pretty good grasp of the situation.

 You know Dad, someday in the not too distant future I'll probably fall into that creek around this time of year and make you jump in after to save me.  Won't that be fun?

It wasn't actually all that cold, relative to say, liquid nitrogen but we really didn't stay out there too long.  We did have a wonderful time playing with Chloe and Leyla, meeting Shane, talking with him and Kelsey (congratulations to them!) and just spending time with family.  A good time was had by all.

November (Gingerbread houses)

So, it turns out, the only thing in November I found interesting enough to take pictures of were gingerbread houses.  So, that's all you get.  Here are the two annual gingerbread houses we made this year.  The first one is the one we made to give to Grandma Whittier.

 Such a festive scene.

Why does the man behind the door have a grenade!

 What a beautiful design Tyson made (my main contribution).
Oh no! They're coming though the windows!

Sniper on the roof!  

Thanks to all of our armed forces (especially Chuck).

And here's the gingerbread house we made to live at our house:

 If you try really hard, you may be able to find one or two references to Disney and Mickey Mouse.

 These are the Mickey hands I made to come out of the chimney (my only contribution to this one).

The Mickeys became a bit of a game of oneupmanship between Angel and her sister Wendy.  I think Angel won.

They made it through the holidays mostly intact although Lincoln did manage to sneak a few Dots... from both of them.

Everything I learned at Disneyland (from Lincoln's perspective)...

Always invite Goofy to breakfast because he's good at keeping secrets.

Daisy is a clean freak!!  She wiped off my syrupy hands faster than I could say, "Quack, quack."

Statue Goofy is not as cool as Real Goofy.

While wearing a Nemo costume, you must run around in circles, and make mom chase you.  Not only does is make you a star on complete strangers facebook page, but it makes everyone stop and yell, "I found Nemo."

When you get tired of your hat, dad is always a good backup plan.

Even though you're tall enough to ride the Matterhorn, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

There are only three guys at Disneyland...Mickey, Nemo, and Buzz.  This guy must be Buzz.

They do make seatbelts large enough for fish.

Mr. Toad's is a hot spot to pick up on princesses.

This tree is hilarious...and I know funny, I'm a clown fish.

I forgot these ones

These are a couple of pictures I meant to include with the section about Bear Lake but they got skipped over.

1. These are awesome.

2. They remind me of pictures of me when I was little

Lincoln's Summer Update (August)

In case you haven't noticed from other pictures of him, Lincoln has a very expressive face.

As a small example, here's a series of pictures taken in the span of about a minute, presented in the order they were taken:

^This one is my personal favorite.

I would caption those but I think they speak for themselves.

On her way down to visit her Granddaughters Grandma visited Lincoln too and we went to the dinosaur museum.

I know there are no dinosaurs in this picture.  Lincoln's favorite part was actually this little ramp with balls to throw down it (something about light waves?).  Lincoln enjoyed playing with the balls and we all enjoyed having Grandma around.  She's so upbeat all the time that even when we made her go be in the cave by herself (Lincoln had no interest in following) she was still smiling.

Sometime after Grandma's visit we had a little family reunion with Angel's family.

There was a parachute to play with.

And Lincoln got to play some kick ball.

There was some confusion about the kicking thing...

And which way to run...

Grandpa got him straightened out though.

They weren't really keeping score but...

With a strut into the sunset like that, I'm pretty sure Lincoln won.

Because he's nice and apparently didn't have anything better to do, Lee came over and took some family photos for us.  Here's some of them:

You can see a few more here.