New Little Guy!!!!!!!!

   He's finally here!!

   You've just been waiting and waiting for a reason to get out of bed and turn on that computer, I know. (Pro tip: put the computer in your bed with you. Problem solved.) Well, little Lincoln James Gilchrist is here to occupy your ample spare time.

  Little Link was born in a hurry. I'll spare the gory details, but the nurses went from rolling their eyes at our urgent requests for a delivery to screaming "Get that doctor in here or I will have to deliver this baby right now!!" down the hall. This is not a joke. That was on Thursday, the 11th of December, 2014. He weighed 7 pounds, 5 ounces, was 18 inches long, came at 9:30 pm, and who on earth cares about all of these stats anyways?

   I want to have one blog post without the #sarcasm that you all love me for. I want to talk about how blessed I feel to have this family and how great my wife is and what a huge gift all of my family and Cara's family is, but even writing that last sentence made me feel a little bit nauseous, so that plan is out the window. Let's start a long lifetime of sibling comparisons:

   Can you tell which one is which? Well, the picture quality is incredibly low with the image on the right, suggesting that it came from a more primitive time when camera phones were less like cameras and more like the cameras that were sold for Game Boy Color back in the 90's. The one on the left is Link, who had more hair, darker skin tone and terrifyingly purple hands at birth, and the one on the right is Wyatt, who ears stick out a little further, has a smaller bridge to his nose, and has obviously been cleaned up a bit. The Wyatt picture was the background to my flip phone for almost three years, and was long my favorite picture ever, but I can't use words like "favorite" regarding one of my children anymore, unless I tack on some lame qualifier. "Favorite son to eat that cookie," or "favorite son who's here right now," or something.

   Now we can jump forward a bit and compare little Wyatt to not-quite-as-little dad.

   Huh. I am not sure what comparisons can be drawn from this. Both are blonde-but-getting-darker, both have on a country-folk shirt on. Let's keep going. Here's my dad, Wyatt and Lincoln's Grandpa:

Apart from the fact that this person seems to have grown up in The Land Before Color, this is pretty fun. Can we keep going? There have to be more comparisons for us to look at.

Oh! I know, we can see how I've changed from Wyatt's birth to Lincoln's birth. This should be fun! At this point I am just typing to try and fill the white space that is going to come from having this photo of my dad off to the side instead of in the middle. I know, it's pretty pathetic, but at the same time you are the one sitting there, reading this pathetic text. Heck, you're reading this pathetic blog. This is a sad day for you's everywhere.

If I put a line in between the space will fill faster.


Gosh this picture is long! I need to just keep on adding this thrilling and entertaining filler text!!


And now I realize I need stuff in between to break it up. Okay, here are two pictures of me from the two boys being born:

Oh gosh I'm sorry I had no idea this would be so creepy. That grin!! It's just... it's going to stay with you for a couple of days!! Again, Lincoln on the left, Wyatt on the right. The picture on the right is from September of 2011, when I learned yet again the wearing yellow really brings out the yellow in my teeth.

Okay, one last picture for us to play with and compare:

   Yao Ming makes Shaq look like a regular person, but what's craziest of all is that Christina Aguilera is actually 6 feet tall!!



   I don't really know how this happened. I started by telling you about my new son and ended up somewhere else. Entirely. I guess that little Link has to get used to this. I am a big deal and the focus of conversation and parties and blogs tends to just gravitate towards me. I just hope that Wyatt, Lincoln, my wife, (and you) understand that the only person I am ever really making fun of is myself.

My mood: proud daddy
Wyatt's mood: growing more fond of his brother
Lincoln's mood: eat and sleep and that's all.
Cara's mood: glad to not have a person inside of her.
Listening to: Zelda soundtrack

Gonna Do Some Things Differently!!

1.3 years old. February 2012. Happiest day of his life, apparently.

   Baby #2 AKA New Wyatt AKA  Bruce Wayne AKA Marcus Mariota could come at any moment. Waiting for the new guy is kind of like playing Catch Phrase, where the timer starts going faster and faster. That timer is going to buzz, and it could buzz right now, but you just know that the person on your right is going to get the word she needs and throw the thing at you just before it goes off and it's super stressful so you cheat and answer the word for the other team and then grab the thing and don't even look at the word and just pretend like the word was "tree" and say "CUTITDOWNMAKEWOOD!!" and your partners are all idiots and they say "Old Man Skinner's Barn!!" and you say "YES!!!!" and press the button and pass it so that the other team can't even see what your word was at all but then you think "Wait could I do that everytime?" and pretty soon you never read the actual word anymore but spend the whole game trying to figure out what word you should make up next time and it's almost always objects that you can see so you can be like "It's that thing over there!!" and your partner says "A fedora!" and you never lose.

   It, um, it's just like that. Point is, baby's coming. We don't have a name for the little guy, but he's coming.

Also 1.3 years old. Notice the pellet stove blazing away. RIP, stove.

   So, since I am a good parent, I have been thinking about things that I can do better with this new one. Wyatt is pretty much good and screwed up, nothing we can do about that. We always viewed him as a test kid anyways. (That's what makes him special!!) But now that we've got this thing figured out, here's what we'll change and what we'll keep the same:

Things To Change
1) Only hold Marcus on my left arm. I've been exclusively right-sided with Wyatt. He won't even try to sleep on my left shoulder anymore. As such, my right arm has gone from it's pre-Wyatt status of *ripped* to a whole new level of CUT. It is a thing of beauty. All my selfies are basically just pictures of my right arm. I even got a tattoo of my right arm on my left arm. Unfortunately, my left arm has pretty much just shriveled and died in this time frame. So this is going to be a left-hand-only gig.

   That's it. End of list.

Christmas-Eve 2012. Wyatt is like Derek Zoolander, he's not an ambi-holder.

   Come on, are you surprised? I've been writing this blog every day bi-monthly for nearly three years, so you've seen first-hand just how freaking awesome I am at this. I've never rammed Wyatt's head into anything while throwing him in the air. I've only locked him in the car once, and he was asleep the whole time so no big deal. Sure I let him play in a truck full of fertilizer for days before realizing that "fertilizer" really means "poo," but I was right in there with him!!

   What would you change?

   Oh, I see. So you think I'll be a bit calmer and more relaxed on my first day home with the baby than I was with Wyatt?! Well that's where your wrong. See, I'm pretty sure that over this long, meandering stroll to having a three-year-old, I've forgotten pretty much everything about having a newborn. What do they eat?! Vitamins?! Do I just chew up vitamins and put them in a bottle?! I haven't changed a diaper since June, so, I guess that'll have to start up again. Oh! That's one thing I'd change this time around:

Things To Change
2) Potty train the baby on like day 4.

There, that's a good thing to add to the list. Whoa, now that I think about it, there are lots of things I should change.

Things To Change
3) I love it that Wyatt can take off all his clothes now, and even put on his own shoes, so let's get Marcus Mariota to do that in a few weeks.
4) Transition from "crying" into "singing." That way whenever the baby is crying it can be to the tune of Miley's "Jolene." (Seriously, have you heard that banger? It's like daaaaaang grrrrl!)

That does it. If I can handle those four things, New Marcus will be a perfect kid, just like his brother Bruce Wyatt.

My mood: anxious and stressed
Wyatt's mood: sleepy and hungry
Cara's mood: STOPASKINGLET'SJUSTHAVETHISTHING
Listening to: Jolene