• “Mom you’re crazy.” 
• Uncle Eric told Beckham a story about Thomas the Train and concluded that Thomas had a big heart. Beckham's response: “Thomas doesn’t have a big heart. He has a little boiler.” 
• While opening a you Tonka truck on his birthday: “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. It’s so CUTE!” 
• After I moved his Tonka truck because he was trying to run over my garden plants: “Mom don’t bother me. I’m a very special kid.”
• In response to Dallin sleep talking: "What in the crap.” 

summer hikes at Cecret Lake, Snowbird, Silver Lake, and part of Circle All Peak. Walker falls right asleep in the carrier!

a Provo 4th of July with both my family and the Urness family. Beckham was over the moon to ride the bus to watch the parade and then again later to go to the Stadium of Fire.

pics including  Beckham going to the rodeo and cozying up with a random cute teenage girl; Beckham after falling in the fountain to fetch a pine cone; Walker enjoying our home-grown cucumbers; our cat Atticus always choosing to lay right next to Walker, even if it means getting grabbed by baby fists

Beckham always disappears behind all the flowers and vegetables in our big garden to play in the dirt with his trucks.

first day of preschool Beckham's big third birthday party was cancelled due to a thunderstorm, but we had fun celebrating nonetheless!

My cousin Paige and I had our boys about two weeks apart, so we decided to throw a combined birthday party for them.  The theme was Chugga Chugga Two Two! and when Beckham woke up from his nap to find the house and backyard decorated, complete with a bounce house, he was ecstatic! 

Beckham with half a dozen train tattoos from his birthday party

Two-year-old Beckham is a HOOT. Some funny things at this age:

• He likes to make sure the cats get timeout like he does.  If they get on the table, which is something that he does that merits a time-out, then he shouts, "UH-OH! Me-mout!" which is his pronunciation of time-out. 
• He loves vehicles.  At least once a day I'll hear him say, "Beep beep, vroom vroom!" 
• He loves singing and can frequently be heard singing nursery rhymes to himself. 
• He is figuring out his speech sounds, and for some reason right now he uses a lot of non-English guttural sounds. When he was younger, he "fronted" everything (e.g. K turned to T), and then this evolved into his backing everything (e.g. T turned to K) and then it evolved into the guttural sound, most commonly for the T in the word train.  It reminds me of the German CH sound.  Beckham also currently has a frontal lisp (he sticks his tongue out for S and similar sounds). As for his language, his vocabulary has EXPLODED in the last little while.  Sometimes, though, he will just be so cutely and confidently wrong about a word.  For example, Beckham saw a picture of a coconut and shouted, "Bumble bee!" Can you tell I'm a speech therapist who is quite intrigued by my child's speech and language development? 
• If I am ever or crouching sitting on the ground, he suddenly ambushes me with, "Monkey monkey!" and jumps on my back. He loves horse-playing with Dallin, too; I just have to be extra cautious with Beckham because he does not always understand the concept of a baby in my tummy. 

Beckham blowing out Dallin's birthday candles

 Auntie Olivia saved the day helping me get ready for Beckham's first birthday party. At 10 PM, when I was staring at the two cakes I had baked trying to figure out how on earth to frost them like those cute Pinterest pictures, Olivia called and asked if I needed help.  That sweet girl had already made a wedding cake that day! Sophie also came over to help me make the appetizers.

At the party were some of Beckham's baby friends and some family, including my parents, who were in town helping Sophie move up for college. The ball tent was a great success for the babies, but the cake was not -- Beckham looked around curiously while everyone sang to him, but after hesitantly touching the cake, knocking it over, and getting frosting stuck to his fingers, he was not so happy.  He shook his hands, trying to remove the frosting as he began to fuss. Then my mom put some frosting in his mouth and he high-pitch SCREAMED. 

Since as long as we were dating, Dallin joked about me dressing up as a whale and him dressing up as a fisherman were I to be pregnant over Halloween. Luckily, I was not pregnant over Halloween, so we had to come up with another costume idea. Dallin always said that newborns are little potatoes, so of course we had to dress up as potato farmers and their potato. I drew the Famous Idaho Potatoes logo on a sack and my mom made potatoes out of cotton and nylons, and voila, Beckham was a potato.

My cousin Paige and I had our babies two and a half weeks apart. I can't state enough how great it is to have someone who is also experiencing first-time motherhood.  We've met up to take our babies on walks around the neighborhood and around the BYU art museum and campus.   We both were very excited to go to Cornbellies, the local fall festival with its corn maze, pumpkin patch, haunted house and everything else fall-related.  We definitely overestimated how much we could do with little babies; the gravel around the festival made it very hard to push strollers and the corn maze didn't even allow them.  So we joked that the festival tickets were the price for cute pictures at the pumpkin patch and agreed that next year will be a lot more fun.

 

Shadows from the eclipse.

Some pictures from weeks 4-8 with Beckham. Around week 7 he started rolling to his right side if you laid him down on his left.  Not long after he rolled out of tummy time.

 This year for Dallin’s birthday, we invited several of our family and friends to join us at a park for some food, some sports, and a pie eating contest. Dallin’s pilot stepdad, mom and baby sister flew in from Arizona on their little plane just for the occasion.  The actual day of his birthday we went out to breakfast at Blackbear Diner and then I didn’t even see him the rest of the day because he headed to a Rust meetup to learn how to program some games with other coders. So we made sure the Saturday party was a worthy celebration! 

Dallin didn’t ask for much because he already got himself some of the big things on his wishlist, and the short list he gave included included Hostess cupcakes, a treat he never buys for himself. So now he has a year supply after being given some by multiple people!