Chris & Naomi Hathaway Home

Lincoln and I went on our first Father Son campout this last weekend. We've been camping once before, but this time it was with all his friends from church. We had loads of fun, roasting hot dogs and smores, seeing a magic show, sleeping in a tent and waking up to rain, and having a big pancake breakfast. The campground was minutes from our house, owned by the Church, so I think we'll be back there many times in the future. Here are some pictures from the trip:

S'mores!

Hungry Lincoln before:

Full Lincoln After:

The Monkey Bridge:

Every once in a while Lincoln does something we had no idea he knew how to do, because he doesn't seek it out on a regular basis. He has surprised us with drawing before, but the other day, he drew this for us:

My favorite part is the nose...

Lincoln started preschool last week. We've been really wanting him to have more social interaction (he doesn't need the education part; he's already doing addition :) ), so we asked around, and found a really nice school called "Bible Bears" that he goes to Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 2. It's at a local baptist church, so he gets a bit of "chapel time" as well, where he learns Bible stories and songs. He asked us if his school was at the church with the big "t" (the cross). He was a bit nervous at first, but did just fine and is very excited to go back. And we're excited he gets some time out of the house with kids his age.

Here are some pictures of his first day:

Oh, and he started primary this year. He's a sunbeam, and on his very first day he gave the scripture and a talk (there weren't many there from his class). He had no fear and has been doing wonderfully every week.

I've been working on a project recently related to AggData, where I'm parsing out unstructured Store Hours data into standardized open and close times. It's fairly complicated, so I decided to draw out a chart of some of my logic so I would have a plan going into the complex programming involved. Tonight, though, when I looked at my notes, here's what I found:

I couldn't be prouder.

The other day we were at Target and I decided he needed a replacement for the cheap orange plastic harmonica he found a few weeks ago. So, we bought him a good one, and who knew what kind of musician we've been hiding:

Notice the Yoga tree pose he's trying to hold at the cadences :)

We also got out the kazoo and had a bit of fun (who knew being a fly was so exhausting?):

Lincoln turned three last Saturday! Happy Birthday Lincoln!

To celebrate, we had party at our house, very similar to last year's party. It even had an almost identical guest list (we're not that creative on short notice). Everyone played in the backyard for the first while, and Lincoln was able to show off his mad soccer and baseball skills to the other kids and parents. And, we got some decent use out of the plane we got him last year, since there were actually a lot of kids there:

After play we went in and had food and cake. One novelty about the party was our food. I was inspired by my new job's cafeteria, and we did a build-your-own-quesadilla bar. You could add cheese, meat, peppers, onions, mushrooms, olives, etc, and then grill it up (okay, fry it). It was very popular with the kids and adults, but then some of the kids went back outside and started dumping flower pots. We had cupcakes, and Lincoln actually successfully blew out one of the candles. Mom had to help with the other two, because he was starting to spit on them.

Lincoln got lots of great presents, but his favorite was definitely the lightsaber. Not necessarily our favorite...

For a slideshow of photos of the party, click here.
For some video, click here.

So, if you hadn't heard yet, Lincoln was Buzz Lightyear for Halloween this year:

He really got the hang of it this year, and there were no problems getting him in the costume. But he didn't understand why he had to keep going to houses and getting candy when he already had candy in his bucket. He was fine just crunching dum-dums all night.

Anyway, check out the full gallery to see some video of him trick-or-treating.

Grandma was able to bribe Lincoln into singing some of his favorite songs. See if you can spot some of the small variances with his personal take on Sound of Music's "Do Re Mi".