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Some photos of Garrison in the late winter/early spring are now in the photo gallery.

Now that early spring is upon us, Garrison is spending more and more time outside every day. At day care, they bring the kids outside every afternoon and let them crawl and toddle around an enclosed area with toys and a sand box. This means that every day that we pick Garrison up, he’s got really dirty hands and sand in his hair, pants, shoes, and often, his diaper. At home, it’s often hard to get him to come back inside without picking him up and depositing him indoors, which always leads to a crying spell.

Dalla is enjoying spring even more. She spends almost more time outside than in. She spends her days reclining regally in the back yard, and generally graces us with her presence most often around meal times.

Sarah started her annual attack on the weeds in her herb garden over the weekend while I took the blade off the mower last weekend so that it could be sharpened. We’re currently looking at fencing options to keep both rabbits and small humans out of herb and vegetable gardens.

Sarah and I started biking Garrison to and from day care a couple of weeks ago. We bought a bike trailer years ago for shuttling groceries home from the market, and this year we finally rigged it for human travel now that Garrison can ride in it. The only downside is that his day care is on top of one of the largest hills in town. It’s a rather punishing uphill ride from our place, but coming home is literally all downhill. If nothing else, all that uphill riding is good exercise for Sarah and I. Garrison doesn’t seem to mind the trailer, but he’s definitely not fond of his helmet. A couple of times I’ve gotten home only to find his helmet in his lap, rather than on his head.

Now that he’s mostly figured out walking, Garrison is working on climbing up. He started by climbing a little two or three inch step from the patio to the garage, and by climbing up onto the seat of a low futon in his bedroom. Since then, he’s gotten much more adventurous. We were in the kitchen over the weekend and were generally giving him less than a quarter of our combined attention because we were both working on something and we have the kitchen fairly well baby-proofed. It got fairly quiet (always a bad sign), so we looked up to find him standing on the seat of the rocking chair we keep in the kitchen, rocking back and forth while holding on to the back. That was an unexpected sight. He’s also tried climbing up some other places in the house, but is currently limited by his short stature to locations where he can get a solid handhold and pull himself up with his hands and arms. Fortunately, those locations are few and far between. He found it possible to climb into the seat of the rocking chair because he was able to get a grip on the slats that form the chair back.

One of Garrison’s few words (or is it a phrase?) is “Uh oh” said in a bit of a sing-song. He likes to say that after throwing his milk or water cup over the side of the high chair. We can only assume that he learned that at day care as neither of us can remember teaching it to him. It’s generally cute, though he often says “Uh oh” before throwing something over the side of the high chair, which definitely lessens the cute-factor significantly. The invocation of Dalla’s name is the concomitant to food flying off the high chair, though whether or not it precedes the airborne vittles seems to be predicated mostly on whim.

It turns out that our yard is under all that snow after all. Madison has been reveling in higher than normal temperatures for this time of year over the past week. Not only has it been nicer outside, but our snow cover is greatly diminished. That means that we’ve gotten an early start on the Spring mud season, but we’ve got to get through that to get to summer, so that’s a price we’ll gladly pay.

Garrison is trying to wear out his shoes with walking. Once he got the general hang of it, he hasn’t showed any interest in crawling. Of course, with walking (and being upright generally) the potential for mischief in new places and in new ways has only grown. He loves the microwave, which is alternately cute and annoying. It’s cute when you’re not using it, but when he turns the microwave off while you’re heating something in it, that’s annoying. We’ve had to move some electronics up to higher ground since he became just too fascinated with them. He figured out how to page the handset for the cordless phone from the base station, so that is mounted on the wall now. He likes to go into rooms, partially shut the door, and play peek-a-boo, which is fine until he locks himself into a room because he hasn’t quite figured out doorknobs yet. I preemptively replaced the bathroom doorknob because it could lock from the inside but there was no way to open the lock from the outside and I had nightmarish visions of the babysitter calling me and telling me that he had locked himself inside while I tried to talk her through the process of using the reciprocating saw to cut a hole in the door so that she could open it.

We’ve had to leave the bathroom door shut all the time now since he figured out the fun of dropping things in the toilet. It started with diapers. After he saw us cleaning out his diapers in the toilet, he decided to join the fun by grabbing some clean diapers off his changing table and depositing them in the toilet. Since then, other items have found their way into the bowl and hence, the closed door.

Garrison is maturing mentally and trying all sorts of new head games. He’s started testing us to see if he can get a reaction from us by doing things that he knows he shouldn’t be doing. For instance, we don’t want him playing with or in the dog dishes so he gets a “no” every time he tries it. However, sometimes he deliberately bangs Dalla’s food dish just once with something, waits for us to tell him “no”, and then cackles happily. The temper tantrum is also part of his act now, as he tries to get his way more often.

Now that he’s older than one year old, we’ve dramatically expanded the number and variety of foods that we’re giving him and he’s showing definite preferences. For instance, he rather inexplicably loves broccoli but most other vegetables are bad. He has no time for cheese, but he ate almost an entire bratwurst last night. Pasta with red sauce is good; pasta with butter is bad. Plain whole wheat bread is good; plain waffles and zucchini bread are OK; waffles with maple syrup are bad. Ritz, oyster, goldfish, and graham crackers are good. Plain chickpeas are very good; beans in soup are good; refried beans are bad. Plain tilapia is good; plain tuna is OK; salmon is bad. Every time we set him down to a meal, it’s an adventure to see what he’s going to eat.

The curling season is coming to an end for Sarah and I. We’ve each only got a couple of games left before the season ends. After curling ends, it will be time to break out the garden tools and tackle the yard again.

The weather here in Madison has been relatively nice (for winter), and since Garrison is actually big enough to wear the bike helmet we bought him, Sarah and I decided to take him out in the bike trailer for a ride. It was mid-thirties and sunny, so we dressed him for the weather, put him in the trailer, and set off. We took a relatively short twenty minute ride with a stop in the middle so that if he hated the experience, he wouldn’t be stuck in the trailer forever. As you can see from the picture in the Photo Gallery the ride apparently wasn’t half-bad.