I Am Lincoln

After 9 months of pushing, dragging, sitting on, falling off of, and having Mommy and Daddy carry his bike, Lincoln discovered this week that if he pushes down on the pedals, it goes on his own power! Yay! Suddenly, neighborhood walks take on a whole new element of speed!

Check out Lincoln's awesome Dino tie! Shawn found this tie on his mission and has never worn it, but thought it was cool, it is an official Smithsonian tie with dinosaurs on it! It suffered a mishap at church a couple of weeks ago when Lincoln had to go potty, but luckily Uncle John works at a dry cleaners, so the tie is as good as new!




Lincoln's potty training is going very well. We are on week 3 and he has got the hang of it. He is pretty much potty trained at night too! I couldn't believe it, but after the first couple of days he started waking up dry or in the middle of the night to "go". We still have accidents here and there, but we are really proud of him for catching on so quickly!

This morning of November 15th 2009 at precisely 10:17am, Lincoln made his first poopoo in the potty. He has been cheering "I did it!" nonstop for the past 10 minutes. Congrats to our new big boy!!!

Goodbye you ridiculously expensive diapers!

Linc's been incredibly entertaining lately. Our very own circus monkey :) Here are some of his Lincoln-isms and escapades in October and November. By the way, he has officially reached a milestone in height: 3 feet! I remember when I reached that height. . .in the 7th grade. :)

• One morning Monica was getting ready for work. Lincoln was laying in bed with me and then said "Mommy go work, Lincoln go school, Daddy go airplane." Guess I've been doing a lot of traveling lately.
• Lincoln was in the bathtub and sang the whole ABC song all by himself.
• Lincoln was Buzz Lightyear for Halloween this year. In the weeks before the big night, Linc wore his costume constantly and developed sound effects for it. When he pressed the small buttons he said Buzz Lightyear lines like "Buzz Lightyear to the rescue!" and "To infinity and beyond!" When he pressed the big red button, he said "pssht" and raised his arms up for his wings. We got a good kick out of that.
• Uncle John came over to babysit Linc one night. Linc looked at us and said "My John, you go away!"
• After many long years of searching, I finally found one of my favorite childhood books. It was out of print but has just been rereleased again: Bears in the Night, a Berenstein Bears classic! We got it, read it about a million times, and Lincoln can now read the whole book. I got it recorded one night as well.
• Lincoln was eating crackers. Monica told him there weren't anymore. Lincoln thought for a second and said, "Go to Walmart and get more!" We're glad to see Linc knows how the world works. When it's all gone, go to Walmart to get more.
• We were watching Star Wars (Lincoln's self-proclaimed favorite movie!) He picked up a toy bowling pin and used it as a lightsabre while he watched. It was hilarious! Behold the skills:
  

Linc likes the swimming pool. He likes jumping into it even more. Each time we go swimming a good 30 minutes of that time is now dedicated to doing cannonballs into the pool. Linc climbs out, steps to the edge and yells out "CANNONBALL!" except you only really hear "CANNONB. gurgle, gurgle, blub, blub" as he goes into the water. It's pretty hilarious.

This past Saturday the 12th we took Lincoln to his first movie ever! We saw "Up". And yes, we saw the whole thing. Linc sat and enjoyed pretty much the entire flic other than when he got stuck in his chair. He said "Mommy, I stuck! Help me!" You know how those dollar movie theatre chairs are like: virtual bear traps! But we survived with all our limbs and thoroughly enjoyed Up. Today, I took Linc for a walk and he suddenly started saying "movie, guy with balloons, dog, bird, that was funny!" See Up and you'll know what Linc was talking about there.

Our little boy likes movies. Like father like son!

This morning I was showing Lincoln a card that had pictures of a lion, a monkey, and a giraffe. I asked him one by one what each one says. This is the conversation:

Me: Lincoln, what does a lion say?
Lincoln: Rowrrr!
Me: What does a monkey say?
Lincoln: Oo ee aa oo!
Me: And what does a giraffe say?
Lincoln: (After looking at the giraffe for a few seconds) Giraaaaaaffffe! (in a high pitched voice)

We died laughing!

"Bullen" hair (noun) : the completely uncontrollable protruding coating of hairs on a Bullen boy's human head. Also seems to be a dominant gene trait when cross-bred with Jensen hair.


In other news:
Lincoln loves to help with the laundry. He is known as the "best-button-presser" in our house. He loves to start the washer and dryer and believe it or not he loves to clean the lint out of the dryer; he does a pretty good job too! And he does it without me even asking...someday his future wife will thank me =) Just a couple of pictures of Lincoln being cute.

We regret to report that Air Jensen flight 623 has crashed near the front door. It appears the Lego Jumbo Jet suffered major turbulence due to a 2 year old named Lincoln ripping the wings off the fuselage mid-flight, sending the remains of the plane into a nosedive directly into hard tile. We are told there were no survivors.

This morning we were playing in the living room when we noticed an earwig crawling across our tile floor toward the front door. I asked Linc where the bug was going and he said "on a walk!" after which Lincoln opened the front door to let the earwig go on his "walk."

On another note, earwigs don't crawl in your ears while you're asleep and lay eggs so their babies can eat your brain.

This morning we woke up to Lincoln crawling in to bed with us. After a couple of minutes, Lincoln said: "Church"? And I said "Yes, today is Sunday, and we are going to church." Lincoln's response was priceless... "Church!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

The irony is that with that kind of excitement you'd think that Lincoln would want to put his church clothes on without a fight and that he would to want to sit quietly in Sacarament, and be a well behaved angel of a boy...nope! Well, at least he's excited about church in general so maybe we are doing something right. :)

This morning I was getting Lincoln ready for "school" as I was getting ready for work.

Me: "Lincoln, we need to hurry because Mommy needs to get to work early today."

Lincoln: "I go work."

Me: "I would love to have you come to work with me today, but what would you do all day?"

Lincoln: "Eat!"

Right now, I'm sitting in the family room and Lincoln keeps running in the kitchen and bringing back one magnetic letter from the fridge. He shows it to me and I say what it is. He then repeats it and goes and puts it back. Then he grabs another one. We've gone through about 3/4 of the alphabet so far.

Funny kid!

Monica is gone to girl's camp so it's a boys week at the AZ Jensen's. Holla!

The past few weeks Linc has begun singing along with us when we sing. His favorite songs right now are Popcorn Popping, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and Row Row Row your boat. For that last one he sings Row Row Row Merry Merry Merry. Cute kid!

When he sings Sunbeam, Shawn sings the words and when it gets to the BEAM! part, Lincoln shouts Beep! He's also made it into a game where instead of saying Beep!, he starts cheering instead.

Linc is a huge tease! I know I'm partly to blame for that. :)

-Shawn

Believe it or not it doesn't rain very often here in Mesa, AZ. A couple of weeks ago we had a stormfront (I use the term stormfront loosely, although it did actually rain off and on for a couple of hours, which is very rare) come through and give us a couple inches of rain. This was Lincoln's first time playing in the rain.

Lincoln has mastered the phrase "I'm two"! He tries to hold up 2 fingers, but we are still working on that. He has mastered all sorts of new tricks. He can say a couple of complete sentences: "I know"!, "I see you", "Where are you"?, "I'm two", and "I took it off". This last phrase is a little garbled, but you can get the general idea. He can say all sorts of words now and occasionally surprises us when he uses a new word. For example last week we were pulling into the church parking lot and he started calling out "church".

We LOVE that he can communicate with us, it has made life much easier.

I know some of you are thinking "Wow, Lincoln's already praying, he must have really spiritual parents"...well that isn't exactly the case. We have managed to teach Lincoln how to fold his arms for the prayer and to say amen, but he hasn't been very interested in repeating what we say.

*Just as a side note Lincoln has been saying "Amen" when he is done playing with his toys, cleaning up his room, or finishing just about anything.

Every night we pray together as a little family in Lincoln's room before he goes to bed. Last night Lincoln repeated (I use the word repeated loosely) the words of Shawn's prayer. The words he can pronounce most clearly are mommy, daddy, "teetee" and Jesus.

I got the chance to hear it tonight; it was the sweetest thing I have ever heard!

Teetee is how Lincoln pronounces his own name! I wish we had this on video, he recognizes himself in pictures, the mirror and on home movies and will say "Momee, Dadee, and Teetee!" It makes us laugh...we are laughing with him, not at him!

Lincoln has gone 2 nights and 2 days with out a binki. He isn't having any problems going to sleep at night, but his daytime nap has been seriously interuppted. He cries at first, but not for very long. Lincoln has never been a big crier, its rare that he has a tatrum that lasts more than a couple of minutes. He just plays in his bed and won't go to sleep. It might be time to hang up the curtains in his room to make it a little darker; I wonder if that would help?

We got Lincoln an Elmo tent for Christmas. At first he was scared of it, but now we play in it almost everyday. In fact, Lincoln loves to read books in his tent. He brings several stuffed animals and his chair and grabs books and then he "reads" me stories. Ironically enough there are no books in these pictures.


Sunday, Lincoln and Shawn built a fort in our living room with our dinning table chairs and our favorite blanket "frogs". You can tell from the pictures that Lincoln and Shawn had a great time playing in here before church.

This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but I am just getting the chance to post it today. Lincoln successfully blew his OWN bubbles. We learned from previous bubbles experience that a bib on Lincoln was the BEST way to go!

Enjoy the pictures and video.

Lincoln has been especially toddlerish this week. We have been trying to give him a little alone time everyday in his room. Yesterday I came in and he had stuffed all the unused, clean diapers in the diaper garbage, including the wipes and all of his lotions. He had pulled out a ton of tissues ripped them up and then tried to stick them back in the box. He sanitized his stuff animals with the hand sanitizer and last but not least ripped all the pop-ups out of one of his books. I am sure you are thinking why did I leave all this stuff in the room, well I didn't think he could reach most of it. I guess we are going to have to do a little re-arranging.

Earlier this week when I came in to get Lincoln after his nap, he was sitting on top of the changing table. This means that he climbed up there from inside his crib! I guess that means we need to change his crib into a bed now.

I forgot to mention in my last post that Lincoln can hold a cup and drink by himself now with minimal spilling. He mastered this trick while we were visiting Grandma and Grandpa Jensen. He has also added several new animal sounds to his act and is finally learning to say "Yes" instead of uh, uh, uh for yes. Shawn and I are especially pleased with this development, because as much as we love him, it drives us crazy when he whines. Lincoln has also gotten pretty good at repeating words. I guess that means we can't swear anymore... just kidding, Shawn and I would NEVER swear.

Shawn and I got Lincoln a talking Elmo toy earlier this week. Lincoln has been very thrilled with his new toy. He has taken him for a ride in his wagon, shared his breakfast, reading time, and posed for pictures. Lincoln also enjoys watching Elmo on Sesame Street. . .with Elmo.