I feel like this used to be easier

I'm not sure why I let whole months slip away without a single new post, but it happens more frequently now then it ever has.

Lenore will be 5 months on the first. We gave her a bit of cereal a few days ago for the first time, and while her tongue seems to get in the way of her getting the food in her mouth, she is pretty good at eating solid food already. It is hard to believe that November 18th she'll be 6 months old. With Link, everything was an event so it all seems like it took forever and I think the following may be why:

(This story is a bit convoluted. For this, I apologize. There is a point, however. You must trust that I will get to it eventually! To skip the whole thing, just look for the double asterisk **)

**I listen to a radio show on my local NPR station called Wiretap. The show is broadcast from somewhere in Canada near the New York border, but that isn't really too important apart from the close proximity to the states. The show is about a man named Jonathan Goldstein and the premise is mostly that he records his conversations. These conversations occur both in person and over the phone with his friends and family (usually somewhat scripted), or with other interesting, weird or funny people he finds (most often legitimate). There is also a theme to each broadcast. One such episode had to do with the passage of time and our relationship with it. In this episode, Jonathan speaks with a man who, in 2011, took it upon himself to attempt to slow down his perception of the passage of time.

The story begins like this: the guest, Matt Danzico, has decided to create an experiment for the period of one year to attempt to slow his own perception of time. The project is called The Time Hack. He got the idea from a study that a researcher named David M. Eagleman (information about Eagleman and human time perception study here), who's hypothesis is that when we experience something new, our brain record lots of extra information which, upon being recalled, is slowed down to adequately process. This makes the event seem to take somewhat longer than it actually did, therefore manipulating time within our own consciousness. Danzico then goes on to explain that his project puts him into a new experience every day for 365 days so that he may be able to experience this time dilation effect first hand.

**My conclusion, therefore, is that being a new parent and having some sort of new baby experience every day with Lincoln caused our brains to record time differently than it does now that we are more experienced. This is why we feel as though Link grew up so slowly, while time with Lenore seems to be flying by.

So, with all that said, we are all doing well. Lenny is getting bigger all the time. She can roll back and forth now and she has been showing signs that she wants to crawl for a while. She hasn't popped any teeth yet, but she is constantly gnawing on herself and anything else she can get in her mouth.

Link is also progressing well. He has a huge vocabulary now. He speaks like a kid 2-3 years older than he is. He sings a lot of songs now as well. He knows nursery rhymes and we read Shel Silverstein poetry as well as other books before bed and before his nap every day. Gena got him into a program that Dolly Parton sponsors which sends him a new book every month until he turns 5. So far, we have received about 5 or 6 books in the mail and Lincoln loves them all.

Finally, I posted a few new pictures to the Picasa account. The slideshow on the right of this blog has all the new pictures. I posted many that Gena took with her phone from over the summer. There are a few from our trip to my family cabin, a few from our trip to Oscoda in August and then random others from swimming and playing outside. The album is almost all new pictures now. The old ones can still be found in the Archive album.

I have a lot happening between school, work, the kids and the house, and my other projects for this fall, but you can be sure that there will be plenty more pictures coming soon. Link turns 3 on the 21st of this month and then there is Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to cover. Plenty to post about for sure!