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Me: “Why do you say ‘No’ to me so much?”
Garrison: “When you say something wrong I say ‘No.’”

It struck me today that Dinah looks more than a little like Jack-Jack in Disney’s “The Incredibles”. She even has the same crazy curl of hair on top of her head.

Garrison’s day care helps the kids keep “journals.” Primarily, these are little one page stories each child tells after reading a book or listening to a story. The teachers write down what the kids say and post it on a bulletin board for the parents to read. Below are a couple of samples from Garrison’s journal.

These are rainbows. I love rainbows.

On Thursday, the rainbows came to play.

The rainbows got hurt and pushed. They cried.

I helped them back so they wouldn’t cry anymore.

I didn’t push them down.

-=-=-=-=-=

My turkey’s name is Dinah Emberly. She slept in a nest with eggs.

There were 2 eggs. The eggs cracked and little eggs came out.

There were more little eggs in the little eggs.

The turkey ate some eggs. She liked them. I do too.

She went in the leaf pile to look for bunnies. She didn’t find them yet.

Then she went into the hostas to look for them and there they were.

There were 2 bunnies. The bunnies said, “Don’t find me.”

Dinah said, “I’m sorry.”

Some other Garrisonisms that I forgot the other day..

Hopsabill

Hospital

Freezy

Refridgerator

Sword Fwight

Sword fight. I’m not quite sure why it has attracted the extra consonant, but it has.

A few translations from Garrison’s words into the English that the rest of us use. This cheat sheet may come in handy if you find yourself interfacing with him for any extended period of time.

Gra-Lumber Bar

Granola Bar

Miss-struction

Construction

Miss-ghetti

Spaghetti

Teh-Vee

TV

Mud Shoes

Croc-like plastic sandals

Flat egg

Fried egg with a broken yolk

I’m thinking about…

I’d like to…

Peanut Butter Quesadilla

Peanut butter on a rolled-up tortilla

Orange cheese

Orange cheddar cheese, not to be confused with (apparently inedible) white cheddar

My beer/cider beer

Apple juice or apple cider

Glass glass

A glass drinking glass, not to be confused with a sippy cup.

Happy Birthday to You!

Your birthday

Hang-ga-burr

Hamburger

Peanut Bomber

AJ Bombers, a local restaurant that delivers peanuts to tables via ceiling mounted “bombs”.

Different candy

The collective term for the candy he collected on Halloween this year.

Gummi Pill

His morning gummi multi-vitamin or evening gummi omega-3 vitamin

Compweeter

A computer

Me: Do you want a chocolate bar for dessert?
Garrison: No. I want chocolate chocolate.
Me: That’s what’s in a chocolate bar.
Garrison: No, it’s not.
Me: Then what’s in a chocolate bar if not chocolate chocolate?
Garrison: Peanut butter, peanut butter sandwich, and quesedilla juice.
Me: *dumbfounded look*
Garrison (firmly): I want chocolate chocolate, not a chocolate bar.

After a long dry spell, I finally added some new Garrison pictures to the Photo Gallery.

Also, I’ll include a photo of Dalla helping us fold some laundry.

Tonight I put one of my surplus bicycle bells on one of Garrison’s tricycles.

“Why did you put the bell on my bike,” he asked.

“I thought you might like it,” I said. “Do you like it?”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “It makes me go faster.”

Sarah: “Where do you want to go tomorrow to look at carpet?”
Me:  “Sergenians?”
Garrison: “They’re closed for three months.”
Me: “Really? Why?”
Garrison: “Because the thunder was loud and they put the tomato sirens up on poles and they went off but I haven’t seen one for a while. Then we have to go to the basement and watch teh-vee.”

What makes it funny is that he meant tornado and not tomato.

Me: Mommy got diddly squat in the mail today.
Garrison: Can I try it?
Me: Go ask your mother.
Garrison (yelling while running to the other end of the house): Mommy, can I try your diddly squat?
Sarah (with a somewhat confused look on her face): Uhh..

The Sambel Cap Jempol Company out of Jakarta, Indonesia, makes one of my favorite sauces at the moment. I picked up a bottle of their Sambel Asli at a local Asian grocer on a whim. Why? It was a big bottle (why must all hot sauces be sold in such teeny little bottles?); it didn’t cost very much; the texture and color looked appealing; the ingredients list was short; and I was intrigued by the idea of trying something from Indonesia. That first bottle disappeared before I could write a review so this actually a review of the second.

The sauce has good pepper flavor, not too much salt, and is thick with peppers (and not thickeners). It’s a shaking sauce, and not a pouring sauce, due to the thickness. Unlike some sauces you can use it both both Asian, Mexican, or Indian cuisine without getting clashing flavors. My biggest gripe with the sauce is the absolutely crummy cap on the bottle. The cap doesn’t seal tightly enough to keep liquid from leaking out, so if the bottle tips in the fridge you will have a mess to clean up. In addition, the sauce always gets stuck in the lid so you quickly end up with a messy bottle even if you keep it upright.

Should you buy this sauce? If you enjoy hot sauces, I would definitely recommend adding it to your arsenal. The heat isn’t for the faint of heart, but the flavor is good, the bottle size is right, and you can’t beat the price. Just watch out for the godawful cap.

Recently I came across Busha Browne’s Pukka Hot Pepper Sauce while spending some time in the Twin Cities. It looked interesting and came with warnings about using too much, so I bought one bottle. The bottle claims that the sauce is made from scotch bonnet peppers. The only evidence I have to support that claim is that those are the only peppers listed on the ingredients list. The sauce itself isn’t very hot, despite what some reviews online would like you to believe. I used just a bit initially, but quickly found myself shaking it all over my plate to the heat up to where I expected it to be. The flavor of the pepper is subdued, especially in comparison to Desert Pepper XXX. The biggest turn-off to the sauce is the extremely thick nature of it. Modified food starch claims a prominent place in the ingredients list and they certainly didn’t scrimp on it. You definitely don’t pour this out of the bottle; you shake the bottle to get the viscous sauce to move from one end of the bottle to the other.

Should you buy this? No. The flavor of the pepper is so subdued that you mostly get heat. The extremely thick nature of the sauce makes you wonder if they haven’t cut costs by reducing the peppers in the recipe and replacing their bulk with food starch. There are definitely better options out there.

We ate lunch at the Memorial Union Terrace today (we were downtown on our bikes for Ride The Drive). While we were there, Garrison took a shine to one of the big chairs and we managed to get a good photo of the moment.

When they were using a jackhammer to break up part of our basement floor a couple of weeks ago, they started early during the day, right when we were having breakfast. It didn’t take long for the breakfast table to clear out since the jackhammer was operating directly underneath it. In the interludes between percussion from the basement you can hear the normal sounds of carpenters working just on the other side of the plastic wall. Enjoy the peaceful sounds of breakfast at our house.

We had Garrison out at a local county park last weekend and he wanted to try the monkey bars on the playground. Sarah took this video of one of his attempts.

For those of you who like pictures, there are some new construction photos in the Photo Gallery, along with a handful of new Garrison photos, as well.

Last week I took some more construction photos and today I uploaded them to the Photo Gallery.

As it turns out, the title of this post is surprisingly apropos in two ways.

I’ll get the big news out of the way first: Sarah and I are expecting another baby in mid-October. We’re both excited to be adding to our family once again. We don’t know the sex and probably won’t find out until the baby is born. We do know that we’re not having twins, triplets, or any larger number of kids, however.

We made some half-hearted attempts to explain the situation to Garrison but he didn’t seem too interested so we dropped the topic for the time being. We’ll try again in another month or so.

For those who don’t know, we’re in the midst of a major remodeling/addition project at our house. We’re adding on to the back of the house to expand the kitchen and the garage, add a room to the basement, and reclaim the bedroom that we were using as a dining room for the baby. This has been a major source of inconvenience for us (life without a kitchen is surprisingly awkward), but we keep looking ahead to the day when it’s all done and we have some great new space.

Garrison has quite assuredly entered his terrible twos. He can be petulant and downright disagreeable at times. At other times, he can be charming, helpful, and funny. Fortunately, he’s more often in the second camp than the first.

He’s still working on language. For instance, we’ve been moving plenty of dirt around the yard using a wheelbarrow and Garrison always refers to it as a “wee barrow”. It makes him seem very Irish whenever he says it. I tried teaching him about magnolia trees the other night (the neighbor’s is in full bloom right now), but “magnolia” was a pretty foreign word to him and he didn’t seem too interested in the topic at hand to devote much thought to mastering it. He’s more than happy to spend time learning phrases like “skid steer loader” and “concrete mixer” so it most likely seems to be an issue of being interested in the item being named. Even so, he’s still having trouble with some of the more difficult consonants (like the letter L), which is typical for kids his age.

It cracks me up whenever he starts a conversation with a new person because he always starts it with the exclamation, “I saw two Bobcats!” Of course, he saw those two Bobcats (skid steer loaders) more than a week ago, but it must have made quite an impression on him because he still jumps right into conversational voids with it. Of course, the people to whom he says this often have no context in which to place that exclamation, so they often look completely befuddled until we explain the situation.

Garrison and I took some construction photos yesterday morning and I uploaded them to the Photo Gallery.

I also put up some of the photos we’ve been taking of him the last few months.

Yesterday I was taking some photos, using my phone, of the big hole in the yard that will eventually become the foundation of our new kitchen. Garrison saw me doing that, grabbed his play phone, and pretended that he was also taking pictures of the hole.

After a couple of minutes of that he put down his phone and happily declared, “All done cheesing!”

With the arrival of Spring comes a post on my long-neglected blog. Everyone in our family is delighted that Spring is finally here. For whatever reason, this was a long winter for all of us. We’ve got some daffodils coming in the back yard and some tulips coming up in the front. It appears that some kale successfully overwintered underneath the snow in one of our gardens and the iris on the south side of our house seems to be leaping out of the ground. The squirrels are back for Dalla to chase. All of this makes us all very happy.

Garrison continues to grow and change with every day. Now that we’ve made it through the bottleneck of winter, he chafes at the bit to get outside every day. He really wants to get outside because we’ve put his big dump truck and digger outside and he likes to dig holes, make dirt piles, and generally pretend that he’s running a construction site in our back yard.

Diggers, in all their forms, are Garrison’s current obsession. He particularly loves excavators, but he also enjoys front-end loaders, backhoes, skid steer loaders, and bulldozers. He also likes to watch dump trucks, and garbage trucks. Basically, any sort of construction equipment gets him going. He has books about diggers that he reads to himself (making up the words at this age) and books about diggers that we read to him. He is always interested in watching diggers on YouTube (“excavator vs house“, the “if i was a digger” series, and “Kids DVD on Trucks – Excavator” are some of his favorites) and we have to carefully monitor his time in front of the screen or he’d spend all day glassy-eyed in front of the monitor. For a long time, he’d ask to watch “digger knock the house down” after he saw a video of an excavator knocking down a house on YouTube. Since then, he’s broadened his request to “watch diggers on peter, please?” which can be translated to “Can I watch videos of diggers on the computer, please?” It can be very hard to say no when he asks so nicely, but we often do.

His favorite book for the last month-plus is Diggerman, which details how a small kid a year or so older than Garrison plans to “buy a huge digger” and what he’ll do with said digger once he purchases it. He took it to day care one day and the teachers said that they read it to him five times during the course of the day. We initially checked a copy out of the library, but once it became clear that he loved the book we bought our own copy. It is not unheard of for him to request an immediate re-reading of the book upon finishing it. Recently, when we’re at a store, Garrison starts talking about buying a huge digger. We were at Target the other day and he said that he wanted to go to the huge digger part of the store so that he could buy a huge digger.

A few months ago I told Garrison—once, in passing—that I had to go to work to earn the money to buy the M&Ms. For whatever reason, his brain made an immediate connection between what I said and what was going on around him. Now he routinely says that Mommy and Daddy go to work to “buy M&Ms”. The other day he caught me by suprise when I was changing his diaper and he said “Mommy go work; Daddy go work; Garrison go work.” I said that he was going to his daycare instead, but he insisted that he was going to work so that he could “buy a huge digger.”

His obsession with construction equipment hasn’t necessarily blunted his love of sports, however. He likes to throw the football around (though he can’t catch it, really), and he still likes to play “hockey” in the living room. We bought him a little toddler soccer goal and he likes to pretend that it’s a hockey goal. He puts himself in front of it and plays “goalie”. When you shoot the puck towards the goal he goes down, writhing on his back, regardless of where the shot actually ends up. It’s relatively amusing. He has some vague idea that soccer involves kicking a soccer ball around, and he knows what baseball is. He’s still working on pedaling his trike (also known as his “bike”), though I expect that he’ll pick that up before too long, especially now that he can ride it outside in the nicer weather.

For breakfast he’s decided that pancakes and waffles are the only acceptable foods most days of the week. Once in a while we are able to get him to accept something else for breakfast (today he had two scrambled eggs, for instance), but those are pretty rare days. Part of the attraction seems to be the fun of winding a sticky, syrup covered fork in his hair during the meal. We’re working on that, but it’s been a slow process so far. Since we don’t have the time to make pancakes or waffles every day, we make a batch on Sunday and freeze the remainder for the rest of the week. Fortunately, his consumption is at a level where we can do that. For a period of time late last year, every morning Garrison would climb up into my lap when I had my eggs, toast, and coffee and mooch whatever he could get his little hands on. It got to the point where he was almost eating more of my breakfast than I was. Since that time, he’s scaled back on the mooching and he no longer is so obsessive about eating my breakfast.

Garrison still loves beans in soups and even plain. He’s willing to try more foods, but most of them are deemed to be “too spicy”, even if they aren’t very spicy at all. He’s slowly coming around to the idea that something can be “too sweet” though usually things he doesn’t like are “too spicy”. His favorite vegetables are carrots, broccoli and cauliflower (also known as “white brocky”).

Sarah and I are embarking on a big project that will significantly affect all our lives in the upcoming months: we are adding on to our house. We’re making a bigger kitchen and reclaiming one of our bedrooms on the first floor that is currently used as a dining room. As part of the addition, we’re moving the basement stairs, adding a full room underneath the addition in the basement, and doing some other work. It’s going to be a very big project and it will take the better part of three months. However, when it is all said and done we’ll have a great new living space.

Our curling seasons are almost over. Last week Sarah curled her last game. My team made the playoffs so we’re taking the ice tonight for our first playoff game. Interestingly, the game is against my old team. We’ll keep playing one game per day this week until we either lose or win the championship. This is my first year with a new team, so it is exciting to make the playoffs in our first year together.