America's Greatest Baby Meets Its Greatest President

Ernie spent some quality time with his grandparents in Springfield, IL the day before his big first party.

Ernie was asking me a lot of questions about whether Washington or Lincoln was the nation's greatest president so I took him to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to put that argument to bed.

We stopped at Obed & Isaac's Microbrewery for some dinner. Of course a guy from my frat seemed to be the manager at the place and we had a polite little conversation. I am pretty close to anonymous in Seattle so this whole "bumping into random people from your past every few hours" is taking some getting used to.

Ern got a Duplo present.

But of course had way more fun doing some inventory of his grandparents' plastic container collection.

Springfield Galavanting

We spent the night at a St. Louis hotel and were refreshed and ready to do all the midwest things.

We met up with Linda for lunch at Dewey's Pizza in University City, MO.

Ern must have been looking extra cute today because I have about 800 pictures of him stuffing his face.

Ern was impressively pounding olives like it was no big deal.

We then traveled to Nana and Baba's house in Springfield, IL.

For some reason everyone thinks it's ok to just play with all my old toys without even asking me first. Rude.

We booked Ern a birthday photo shoot at Washington Park Botanical Garden.

Linda was kind enough to bake Ern some smash cakes. They were very dense, though, and so he couldn't smash them so much as move them around in a messy fashion.

It was a lot of fun and Ern had a good time. As an illustration as to why hiring a photographer is worth it, the photos up until this point are the ones I took on my phone.

These are the photos the photographer sent us:

She is so talented she made Springfield look like heaven. I can testify to the fact that that is not the case.

St. Louis-Based Build-A-Bear Workshop has a deal where you can get a special birthday bear and the price will be the number of years old you are. So of course I was compelled to take him there when he was almost 1.

I've never actually done the building of a bear process so that was interesting. First I had to step on a pedal to run a machine that stuffed the bear.

Then Ernie got to choose its heart design.

Then they tried to upsell us with clothing and other stuff. Nice try! We were born a year ago, not yesterday.

White Oaks Mall's state is a large bummer to me.  Really malls in general seem to be getting destroyed everywhere other than the one closest to us now: Bellevue Square. White Oaks is the mall of my childhood so it's hard to see it doing poorly. Many of the anchor department stores have moved out or just plain gone out of business. They're doing all the things malls do when they have a ton of retail space that they can't seem to fill. I think there may be a community college branch in there, and some government offices. I used to take girls on dates here in high school and hang out with my friends.. It was a lot of fun.

Springfield is both small and crawling with people that I know. So of course I bumped into my friend Danny from high school while I was minding my own business and buying some Chinese food for dinner.

It was a funny little impromptu playdate in a parking lot.