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In mid-June, we took Garrison to a pediatric ear-nose-throat specialist because he’d been having so many ear infections. The doctor unhesitatingly suggested that he have a myringotomy since he was well past the usual standard of six ear infections in six months. As part of that operation, small silicone tubes are placed in the tympanic membrane. Those tubes allow fluid to drain from the ear instead of remaining trapped and providing a breeding ground for bacteria. We weren’t really excited about subjecting him to surgery, but we were even less excited about the prospect of even more ear infections. Beyond that, we suspect that his language development has been slowed by all the fluid in his ears that could never drain out.

So, in late June we brought him over to the Children’s Hospital here in Madison. That facility is relatively new, having opened only a few years ago. It’s still very much a hospital, but if you had to bring your kid in surgery that isn’t a bad place to do it. The kids, generally, are immune to the dread that medical environs seem to breed in people, but the parents are almost always more quiet and subdued. After all, their kids wouldn’t be at the hospital if there was nothing wrong with them. We got to the hospital and were quickly processed into a personal waiting room where Garrison proceeded to explore all avenues for mischief while we waited for him to go into surgery. There is a room in that area full of toys for the kids to use, including a real light like you might find in a surgical suite and a bed that operates like a surgical bed. We met another dad in that room with his two kids (one a girl dressed normally, one a boy in a surgical gown who wasn’t that much older than Garrison). Eventually, Garrison and I went back to the surgical suite where I held him as they administered the anesthesia. Then I went back to the recovery room and waited with Sarah for fifteen minutes or so before we were called to the post-surgery room where he was waking up. It was a rough awakening for him, but eventually he stopped crying and we went back to the recovery room. We had gotten to the hospital shortly after 06:30 in the morning; Garrison went into surgery just past 08:00; and we arrived home shortly before 09:00. He was back to his old self by 09:15. Both Sarah and I felt blessed to have such a good hospital so close to home.

Post-surgery, Garrison has been using many more syllables than he did pre-surgery. All those syllables haven’t led to the acquisition of too many words, but he’s become extremely interested in books. If you’re indoors and sitting down, he will bring you book after book so that you can read them to him. The most prominent new phrase he’s learned is “all done”, which he says in a sing-song voice as “all none”. It’s rather endearing.

Garrison’s appetite is more consistent now that he’s not getting ear infections every couple of weeks. He doesn’t eat a lot at every meal, but the number of meals where he doesn’t want to eat anything has gone way down. He’s still really picky, though. Vegemite is good on bread; peanut butter is barely acceptable; everything else is not. Juice is bad; (decaf) iced coffee with milk is good. Ice cream is bad; jelly beans and gummy candies are good. Chicken is good; bison steak is good; grilled catfish is good; shrimp are very bad.

In other news, Sarah and I have been looking for a new house since February. We’ve seen all manor of houses in a variety of neighborhoods but have had a hard trying finding ones that actually interest us. We want a bigger house, but nothing too big and nothing too far from where we currently live. We really like our location and we’re not willing to give that up for a bedroom and/or a larger kitchen. So, that limits our search significantly. In late June we made an offer on a house just a couple of blocks south of us. It was a five bedroom house that backs up to the school Garrison will attend when he gets a bit older. We toured the house twice and really made an effort to look into all its nooks and crannies before making the offer. We volleyed back and forth with the sellers several times before agreeing to a price. So, we put the wheels of real estate into motion by getting our banker involved, scheduling a home inspection, and starting to pack up the clutter in our current house.

The financing wasn’t a problem, but the home inspection turned up some very expensive issues to fix. The problem with those were that the house had several other expensive issues that we already knew about. While we were willing to sink some money into the house post-purchase, like most people, our supply of funds is not infinite. So, we thought long and hard and decided to back out of the purchase. Given the extremely low interest rates and the fact that the house was so ideally located, it wasn’t easy to walk away. Especially because our neighborhood is very much a seller’s market and there’s no guarantee that we’ll find something else in the near future that meets our needs. However, we didn’t like the idea that we had to buy that house because we were afraid that we wouldn’t find something else.

So, we’re back in the housing market again.

One of the side effects of that aborted transaction is that we now have a storage container (of PODS fame) in our driveway that is 2/3 full of stuff. The original plan was to fill the pod with all of the junk we don’t use on a daily basis and ship it off to the pod storage facility for a few months while we sold our current house and moved into the new house. Then, once we were settled in, we’d arrange for the pod’s delivery. That would allow us to pack and unpack in several steps on either side of the move.

With nowhere to move, though, the pod and it’s 2/3 filled nature is now just a very visible conundrum. Do we unload it and get rid of it so that we can start using our driveway and garage again? Do we fill it up and send it off in the hopes that we’ll find something as the fall comes around? And if we don’t, then what happens? We paid for a month’s use of the pod, so it makes sense to keep it around that long on the off-chance that we find another house we like, but then we can’t keep the car in the garage and the pod is a bit of an eyesore in the neighborhood.

One of the upsides of not moving in the near future is that we’ll actually get to see our garden progress. We’ve been getting raspberries for several weeks now. Because of our warm spring and wet June, we got a big, early crop this year. Garrison likes to help us pick the raspberries, in his own way. You need to get one bowl for yourself, and one bowl for him. Then, you pick two or three raspberries. Put two in your bowl and one in his. Then, let him pour out the raspberry from his bowl into yours while he says “thank you” (which comes out more as a sing-song “dank you”). That goes one for several minutes. After a while, you might notice that he’s not returning any berries to you. That’s because he’s simply eating them. And then, once he’s full, he starts calling after the dog and giving the raspberries to her. You might think that you could avoid some of those lost berries by simply not giving them to him. However, then he starts randomly pulling off complete sections of raspberry cane, often with several berries attached that are usually in various stages of ripeness. So, if you don’t play his game, the overall berry loss is usually much higher.

The city is rebuilding the street in front of our house, which means that they’re also doing utility work to replace gas and water mains. Garrison loves watching the backhoes, dump trucks, diggers, and the like and the drive up and down the street. From his perspective, it would be great if the city could rebuild the street every summer.

For the Fourth of July, we drove down to Whitewater to take in the 4th of July parade. In June, we took Garrison to the Taste of New Glarus and the Green County Dairy Parade in New Glarus and he loved the parade. All the vehicles, and people, and animals really had him rapt. The Whitewater parade, with the addition of marching bands, numerous fire trucks, little Shriner cars, and the like, was even better from his perspective.

Sarah’s mother is in town this weekend, so we’ve got another pair of adult hands to help with keeping track of our extremely energetic toddler.

In the last week or so, Garrison’s language development has really taken off. It probably helps that he’s without an ear infection for the first time in a long time. He’s making all sorts of new sounds, and trying out some new syllables. He hasn’t really mastered too many new words, but he’s trying all the time. He says the word “shoes” and he knows what it means. He knows what the word “sweatshirt” means, but he doesn’t say it. He knows how to say “Touchdown!” and now breaks it out any time he’s excited about something. He even raises both hands above his head occasionally, as though he knows not only what it means, but the signal as well. He forgot how to say “Dalla” during his long string of ear infections and he calls her “Da-Tah” is a sort of whispery-sing-songy voice now. Of course, he calls all dogs “Da-Tah” in that same voice, so maybe he’s actually trying to say “dog”? He has a rudimentary grasp of how to say “ball” but the word isn’t all there yet. He’s now using sign language a bit more. He uses the sign for “milk” when he’s thirsty and he does a version of “all done” when he’s finished eating. Instead of the official sign for “more”, he smashes his fist into his palm as a universal sign for “I want”. In short, communicating with him is getting easier, but we’ve still got a long journey ahead of us.

He’s also taken to climbing up in a big way. He figured out how to climb up on a dining room chair, so now we have to keep an even closer eye on him to prevent him from either climbing up the back of the chairs and tipping them over or climbing up on to the table top (which he tries multiple times per day). He can climb up in his stroller now, and can go up and down stairs fairly well.

He’s also grown a fair bit in the last month or so. He used to fit in size 5 toddler shoes, and now we’re buying 6.5 shoes because the old ones don’t fit any more.

We put in our garden a couple of weeks ago once the danger of frost was past. We’ve got some tomatoes, peppers, beans, zucchini, broccoli, lettuce, kohlrabi, and cauliflower in the garden this year. The broccoli is almost ready to harvest already, while the kohlrabi have taken a beating from something (maybe cabbage moth worms?) that has almost completely wiped it out. The raspberries are coming on strong and it looks like we’re in for a bumper crop this year. The hops that survived the winter are doing generally OK and I should get a reasonable harvest this year. Unfortunately, only a handful of hops survived, so I’ll only get two varieties, at most. I’ll have to plant more rhizomes next spring.

Garrison’s fifteen month video is now available on YouTube.

If I had just one word to describe the members of our house this week, it would be “sick.” It started last week when Garrison (patient zero) brought home another day care plague. This led to not only another set of ear infections for him, it also opened the door for bacterial conjunctivitis (a.k.a. pink eye). Of course, his pink eye didn’t manifest until we were already out the door on a trip to Minnesota. After telephone consultation with our doctor’s office, we decided to wait until we got back to Madison on Monday to seek treatment.

On Monday, both his infections were diagnosed and he started on antibiotics. That same day, I went to work, but locked myself in an office to avoid my co-workers because I wasn’t sick enough to stay home, but I was sick enough to infect them.

Tuesday, I stayed home with Garrison because he wasn’t welcome at day care with pink eye and I was getting sicker.

Today, Wednesday, both Sarah and I were home sick, sick, sick. We’re both hoping for a better tomorrow.

On the upside, Dalla’s mysterious sickness, which prompted her to wake Sarah three times in the middle of the night on Sunday night, appears to have passed.

As mentioned above, we went to Minnesota last weekend to visit some of my relatives. They have a farm west of Rochester that is conveniently located roughly half-way between Madison and Watertown (where my Mom lives). She drove out and met us at the farm, so we shared Mothers Day with her and my relatives.

As we travel, we’re slowly discovering Garrison’s tolerance for trips of various lengths. A driving trip of about four hours is pretty much the limit of what he’ll tolerate before melting down. We flew to Cleveland in April to visit Sarah’s family and for flights, anything over 1.5 hours is tough on everyone.

When we visited Cleveland, Garrison came down with an ear infection on the day we flew out there. Sarah had him checked for an ear infection the day prior to leaving. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his ears. The morning of our departure, Garrison became inconsolable shortly before we needed to leave for the airport. While Sarah put him down for a nap, I pushed back our flight by five hours (and paid a change fee). We eventually arrived in Cleveland, only to suffer through a sleepless night. A trip to urgent care showed both of his ears to be infected and back on antibiotics he went.

It’s become a given that if we travel, Garrison is going to come down with a previously undiagnosed ear infection as we’re walking out the door. Supposedly, the ear infections diminish radically when kids get to be about two years old. That can’t come soon enough.

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.

Now we just have to get through February and March and it’s all downhill from there until summer.

We’ve all been feeling a bit more housebound than usual this winter. Normally, Sarah, Dalla, and I would hit the trails for hiking or skiing or snowshoeing most weekends in the winter. If it was colder than usual, we’d just wear more clothes and stay out for less time. Now that we have Garrison, however, our options are a bit more limited. He really can’t tolerate weather colder than 15 degrees and they don’t make serious outdoors clothing for babies, so we have to pick and choose our days for outdoors exercise more carefully now. Fortunately, the weather was in the twenties last weekend, so we were able to get out and go hiking both Saturday and Sunday.

Garrison’s birthday came and went a couple of weeks ago. Sarah’s parents drove out for the weekend so they joined my sister in helping us celebrate. Garrison still doesn’t quite know what to make of presents, but he gave us the gift of walking the night before his birthday. It was actually a rather dramatic moment when he started. We were sitting around the living room chatting after dinner. GMan has a truck that he pushes around and he pulled himself up using the truck in the middle of all of us. Then, he rather dramatically pushed the truck away and stood there quite deliberately without holding on to anything for 30 seconds or so. It looked a bit like he had something very important to say and he was just searching for the best way to say it. Then, he toddled over to me and gave me a big hug. Then he toddled over to Sarah and gave her a big hug. Then it was back to me and back to Sarah. Then it over to his Grandma and back to Sarah. Then back to me. This went on for five minutes or so and he was just tickled pink every time he completed his little mini-journey. Now, he’s toddling all over the house. His toddling expeditions are getting longer every day and he probably spend more time upright now than he does crawling. He still uses his truck for balance when he wants to run, but he uses it less and less every day.

Sarah made cupcakes for Garrison’s birthday, but he was probably the person who enjoyed them the least. He doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in sweet breads, and the frosting didn’t seem to be his favorite either.

He’s also been eating a wider variety of foods the last couple of weeks. He still doesn’t like foods that you’d expect him to like (jelly, candy, some fruits), nor does he like most meats, but his list of foods that he will at least try has grown. Most startlingly, he really doesn’t like cheese. If he’s going to grow up in Wisconsin, that’s one dislike he’ll probably have to overcome. Our Australian readers might be interested to know that he does seem to enjoy Vegemite, which we have been led to believe, is commonly fed to Australian babies.

In other news, I almost ended up under a stationary bus this morning as I tried to board it. I stepped up to board the bus with my left foot and my right foot lost its grip on the icy curb. The next thing I knew I was dangling partially under the bus while clinging to bars on the door of the bus with a death grip. Eventually, I was able to right the ship and board, but it was an experience that I’m not in a hurry to duplicate.

Sarah recently learned that her brother and sister-in-law are expecting a baby in early September, so that means that we’re an aunt and uncle to be. That’s almost a harder concept to grasp than becoming a father. I never pictured myself as an uncle.

Sarah and I have tickets for the Camp Randall Hockey Classic this weekend here in Madison. An ice arena has been created on the football field at Camp Randall Stadium and potentially 80,000 fans could attend the game this Saturday against Michigan. The Badgers have another good team this year (ranked #3 in the PairWise Rankings) and Michigan is respectable, so we hope to see a good game. The weather is predicted to be chilly, but we both have plenty of warm clothes, so we hoping to have a good time. One of our neighbors will be babysitting Garrison, so it will be a bit of a night out on the town for us.

One of the hardest things about parenting for me to get comfortable with is treating Garrison when he’s sick. With an adult, or even an older child, they can tell you what’s hurting, how badly, how long, and maybe even what might have caused it.

With an baby, all you have to go on is your own experience, and what you can deduce from the baby’s behavior. Do they have a fever? Are they pale or flushed? Do certain actions (diaper changing; feeding; walking; crawling) seem to bother them more than others? Then, from that limited and often fragmentary information, you have to decide if they actually have a medical problem, how bad it might be, and whether or not to seek medical attention.

If you choose not to seek medical attention, then you may be left wondering if you’ve chosen the right course of action. After all, they can’t really disagree with your decision, because they don’t even know a decision has been made, much less that you made it for them.

In short, you’re left making serious decisions in a field that is hardly your specialty; with, at best, limited and fragmentary information; consultation with peers who likely know no more than you do; and little to no feedback.

A couple of nights ago, Garrison woke up screaming in the middle of the night. That, in and of itself, wasn’t unusual because he always wakes up screaming. When Sarah went to get him, she discovered that he was burning up with a fever. So, she got some infant acetaminophen into him. At that point, I got up to find out what all the extended screaming was about, and volunteered to take the first shift keeping an eye on him. We stripped him down to his diaper, pulled out a mattress onto the floor, and he and I curled up together on it.

We hadn’t been lying there for more than a minute when he vomited up all the medicine and whatever else was in his stomach. That was highly unusual. We decided to take a wait and see approach since his fever wasn’t dangerously high, and he’d be sleeping with one or the other of us the rest of the night so if he vomited again, we’d know about it right away and could reevaluate our decisions.

In the morning, his fever was still present, so we gave him some ibuprofen with his breakfast. Ibuprofen usually works well and quickly to reduce his fever. His temperature is often down to normal a half-hour after a dose. On Thursday, however, his fever stubbornly stuck around. Sarah went to work and I stayed home with Garrison since he couldn’t go to daycare with a fever and he was really clingy and unhappy. Every three hours I administered alternating doses of ibuprofen and acetaminophen and, eventually, his temperature came down.

That night we gave him a dose of ibuprofen before putting him to bed and hoped for the best.

Around 01:15 in the morning, he woke up screaming (again, not unusual), and I went in to comfort him. After a few minutes of rocking in the rocking chair, he was sleeping, but his limbs were twitching randomly. When he was awake, I thought that I had noticed his hands shaking. Those two signs were very unusual. In addition, his fever was back and higher than before.

I woke up Sarah and we started down the problem solving tree again. Once again, we gave ibuprofen, stripped him down to his diaper, pulled out the mattress, and setup shifts to sleep with him. I took the first shift, and about a half-hour after he cuddled up against me, he was comfortably asleep.

That didn’t mean that I was comfortably asleep however. As Garrison slept peacefully next to me, I lay there wide awake and wondered if we should have done more. I was fully aware of the compromised decision making process that many people employ in the middle of the night and I worried that we had made some fundamental error or overlooked some subtle clue that might have given us some insight into why this fever was so tenacious and its root cause or that might have prompted us to seek medical attention. It was a long time before I slept.

On Friday, we finally discovered the source of his fever: teeth.

Until yesterday, Garrison still had only one tooth. Friday, a second tooth erupted from his top gums and it looks like a third will be joining us soon. With the emergence of that second tooth, Garrison’s fever disappeared and he slept comfortably (and so did we) for most of the night.

On a less medically-inclined note, I should discuss The Clapper.

Fans of 80’s television commercials will undoubtedly remember The Clapper’s earworm jingle, much to their chagrin.

My Dad gave Sarah and I a Clapper for Christmas this year. We moved it around the house a few times, trying to find a place to put it where it would do us the most good. We ended up putting it in the basement and hooking it up to a light we use when watching television.

At some point, Garrison must have noticed us clapping while we were down there, and he also must have noticed that particular light going on and off after we clapped because we noticed him staring at various lights around the house and clapping. If he’s in the basement with us, he’ll look right at the light to which the Clapper is connected and start clapping. He can’t clap loud enough to actuate the Clapper, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. In fact, he gets a little frustrated sometimes when his clapping doesn’t seem to work the same way ours does.

In a bit of cosmic justice, the day after my last post bemoaning the ugly snow we had, another five inches dropped on Madison.

Now that the holidays are past us, it’s time to buckle down for the dark heart of winter.

We haven’t really had any significant amounts of snow since we got fifteen inches in early December. Since then we’ve had freezing rain, some above freezing temps, some well below freezing temps, and most everything in between. All of that has turned the snow pack into a solid, cementitious base that is now slowly being turned yellow by dogs and grey by cars and airborne dirt.

We spent the holidays at home after deciding that none of us would be very happy cooped up in the car for ten hours (each way) visiting our families. Garrison, to say the least, would be extremely unhappy with that much time strapped into his car seat. That turned out to the be right decision as there was plenty of adverse weather all around Madison that made staying home much safer than braving hundreds of miles of frozen interstate highway.

My sister joined us on Christmas day for a casual dinner. Sarah made her (always excellent) eggplant parm, and my sister brought over her (always excellent) pecan pie. I served some homemade pinot noir, and everyone seemed happy with the meal. After dinner we opened gifts and had a couple of Skype video sessions with our respective families.

Our New Years Eve was predictably low key as Garrison was in bed by 20:00 and we were guaranteed an early wake-up call the next morning from our progeny.

The last week of December both Sarah and I had state-mandated furlough days, plus two more days off, so we had a nice break from our respective jobs.

Now that January has started, the Christmas decorations are down and our house is back to some semblance of normal.

Now that December is upon us, there has been no shortage of snow to remind us that winter has arrived. Two weeks ago we got fifteen inches of very heavy wet snow in less than twenty four hours. That heavy snow weighed so much that a large number of sizable tree branches in our neighborhood fell due to the weight they were carrying. Unfortunately, several of those branches fell in our yard. So, not only did we have to clear the snow from our walks and drive, but we had to break out the chainsaw to cut up those limbs. Sarah and I worked a combined six hours clearing just the walks and drive after that storm.

Garrison has taken a blue-collar approach to walking as he practices several times a day, every day. We bought him a truck that he can either ride or push and he loves to push that truck around the house. He walks lap after lap going out the north door of the kitchen, into the living room, through the entry way, into the dining room, and back into the kitchen through the south door. Initially, he couldn’t really steer his truck very well, so if he ran into something, he was basically stuck until someone freed him. In the last week or so he’s gotten the hang of steering the truck, backing up when necessary, and even switching ends when needed. He likes to walk around looking at the various flat surfaces in the house that are within his reach, looking for new items and things don’t normally belong there so that he can play with them. All that walking and browsing is faster and easier than crawling over to a piece of furniture, climbing up it to see what’s on top, and repeating as necessary until something fun is found. It is going to be a while yet before he can walk without some sort of support, but that day is clearly coming.

On the dental front, he finally has a tooth. After numerous false alarms, a tooth broke through his lower gum a couple of weeks ago. Neither Sarah or I has been able to get a good look at it as he’s really not crazy about having people poking around in his mouth (understandably). We know it’s in there because we can feel him bite spoons with it and it leaves a solitary tooth-mark in apples that we let him have.

As I reported last month, Garrison seemed to be trying to say “dalla” and we’ve decided that “dalla” is, in fact, his first word. He still uses it fairly frequently and incorrectly, but he uses it often enough in the proper context that we’re sure that he knows that Dalla is some sort of “dalla”. Now what exactly “dalla” means is open to interpretation. He doesn’t call all dogs “dalla” so it likely isn’t a general term for dog. He says it when she isn’t around, and often when she is but he isn’t looking at her. However, there are times when I call the dog and he does his best mimicry of my call and then looks for the dog to come running. It’s actually pretty funny when he does it.

In Decembers past, we baked or six different types of Christmas cookies and treats. This year, we baked just two. I had no interest in putting up a big Christmas tree, but Sarah wouldn’t be without one, so she bought a small (four feet tall) tree and put it up on a table in our living room. We put two strings of lights outside (which we don’t normally do) and that’s been all that we’ve done for Christmas decorating this year. I guess the Christmas spirit has yet to infect Sarah and I like it has in years past.

If you’re looking for our annual Christmas card, don’t bother waiting around the mailbox. If they go out at all this year, they’ll be late.

We’ve been absolutely blessed with great November weather this year with temperatures often in the fifties and even in the sixties and seventies. Given that our October was so cold and wet, November has been a pleasant revelation.

One of the nicest things about the great weather has been that we’ve been able to Garrison outdoors on a routine basis without much hassle. We’ve been out hiking several times over the past few weeks and have been out in the yard with him often on the weekends. He loves to swing in his swing, practice walking around the yard (with our help, of course), hold on to the chain-link fence and practice standing, and sing out to the world around him.

We’ve been busy getting the yard and the house ready for winter. The yard has been raked a couple of times now (thanks for your help, Mike), the leaves have been spread on the gardens, the gutters have been cleaned, the summer yard tools have been put away and the snow shovels have been taken out of storage. The lawn mower is empty of gasoline and the snow blower has been checked for service.

While we were out and about this weekend we saw many guys out in their driveways enjoying the sixty degree weather and getting their snowblowers ready for winter. We made sure to get the oil and the gas for ours so that when the first big snow falls, we don’t have to shovel out the drive so that we can go get all the requisite fluids for the snowblower to function. It’s somewhat depressing to think about the long, dark months of winter that lie ahead of us, but that’s the price we pay for living where we do. If we wanted gentle, easy weather year-round, we could always join the hordes in Florida or Southern California.

Our freezers are stocked to their capacity at the moment as we got our yearly 1/4 bison and 1/4 hog in the last two weeks. This is the fourth or fifth year we’ve gotten a 1/4 bison from a local farmer and it is unlikely that we’ll stop next year. We like the taste of bison; we enjoy the healthy eating aspect of consuming bison; we like supporting a local farmer; we think that raising bison is more environmentally sound; and we truly enjoy opting out of the e.coli lottery that is the US food supply. This is the second year that we’ve gotten a 1/4 of a hog and that’s something else we’ll likely continue into the future. The ham, bacon, and chops you get from a locally produced and slaughtered pig just taste better than whatever you might get from Oscar Meyer and their vast processing plants. It might have nothing to do with the pig, and everything to do with the processor, but we’re not all that interested in what separates one product from the next, we just know that the local pig tastes better.

This run of nice weather gave me the opportunity to brew up another batch of beer before I put away my big beer brewing system for the winter. Saturday I spent a few hours brewing up a batch of golden, fairly hoppy English Special Bitter in the garage. It can join the Mild brown ale in the basement until I have a chance to bottle them. At the moment, my beer brewing is outstripping my beer drinking. I’ve got almost ninety bottles of beer ready to drink from my last three batches alone, plus the 100 represented by the Mild and the golden Special Bitter, plus leftovers from numerous other batches. There are also somewhere around 80 bottles of mead in the basement that either soon will be or are ready for consumption. Clearly, I’m not going to go thirsty if we get snowed in for a week this winter.

Garrison is battling through his third ear infection in the last two months. Pretty much every time he gets a cold his ears get infected and this most recent cold was no different. Fortunately, the antibiotics are working their magic and he’s already feeling much better again. We just can’t wait until he grows a bit bigger and he loses the physical traits that make him prone to ear infections.

He’s a real hurricane of destruction these days as he tears around the house. He mastered crawling in the last month or so and he can make surprisingly good time when he’s properly motivated. In recent days he’s taken to practice walking by pushing chairs around while he’s standing or by walking and holding on to stationary object. He really enjoys walking around the house and yard while Sarah or I hold him upright. It will likely be at least a month or more until he’s actually able to walk and stand on his own without assistance.

On the dental development front, the word is: no teeth. Periodically we think that he’s teething, but nothing ever pops out of his gums to prove us right. The doctor confirmed that there are teeth in his gums so we’re waiting and assuming that when they’re ready, we’ll see some teeth.

Garrison is definitely a binge eater. Since he’s started eating more solid foods, he’s shown a real preference for certain foods, often preferring one food over all others. For a while, he would eat nothing but bread. Then he got hooked on puffed rice. Recently, he’ll discard those two and eat only toasted oats (a Cheerios knock-off). The only problem with his addiction to toasted oats is that it takes a long time to eat a serving when you eat them one at a time. You’ve really got to plan on spending forty-five minutes or more in the dining room with him when he’s eating so that he gets enough time to eat all his cereal.

He’s starting to string more syllables together. Sarah thinks that he may be trying to say “Dalla” at times when the dog walks into a room where he is. He can’t actually say “Dalla” yet, so it comes out more like “ahh la”. Could be coincidence; could be deliberate.

He had me laughing pretty hard the other night when he demonstrated, out of the blue, that he understands how to turn pages in a book. As part of his bedtime routine, we read him three our four books. One of those books “Goodnight Moon” is probably a bit long and advanced for a boy his age, but we read it to him anyway. I had just started reading “Goodnight Moon” when he started flipping the pages as quickly as he could. Clearly, he just wanted to be done with the book. Since then, he’s demonstrated several times that he knows how to turn the page, he just doesn’t know when yet.

Both Sarah and I started curling in the last couple of weeks. At the end of this week she will have already curled five games while I will have curled in only one due to a bye, a bonspiel, and some crazy circumstances well outside of my control.

Our plans for Thanksgiving are fairly modest. I’ve got to work Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Thursday we’ll make a ham from our pig and go for a walk in the woods somewhere. Friday is a mandatory furlough day for both of us, so we won’t be working or getting paid. I’m sure that we’ll find some way of keeping busy.

Last weekend we were still enjoying a run of beautiful weather. Nearly every day dawned with some fog that cleared in the late morning. After that we had sunny skies and temperatures in the seventies until early evening when dark would fall and temperatures would head towards the lower fifties. For weeks we had no threat of rain, so every single day it was like living a California summer all over again.

We took advantage of that fact to get out several times over the weekend.

We started by purchasing a new baby backpack. Our previous model was OK for short jaunts around the neighborhood and smaller babies, but for actual hiking with larger babies, it wasn’t the most comfortable. So, we invested some money in a much more comfortable pack that is more appropriate for longer hikes with bigger babies.

We took the pack out to an orchard and Garrison got his first experience with apples fresh off the tree. There isn’t a large variety of apples ripe at the moment, but we plan on going again sometime in October. Interested parties can see photos that we took while apple picking in the Photo Gallery.

We also took the time for another picnic and hike. We went out to Governor Dodge State Park and enjoyed ourselves for another afternoon. Garrison got to roll around on the picnic blanket, suck on some more apple slices, and fall asleep in the new baby carrier. Dalla got to run around and look for critters to hunt (she didn’t find any). Sarah and I got out to enjoy some of the early fall color. Again, there are photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Sunday, Sarah and I both wanted to get out of town for a while and Sarah’s idea of taking a picnic to Devil’s Lake State Park won out. Sarah put together lunch while I loaded the car and off we went.

We stopped on the way and bought some cheese (for home) and some cheese curds (for the picnic). About an hour after we started, we pulled into the parking lot. The park can be fairly crowded in the summer as it is the single most popular state park in the Wisconsin. On Sunday, while there were plenty of people there, it was far less crowded than it often is during the summer.

We spread out our blanket in the shade under some trees and enjoyed a pleasant picnic. Garrison played with plastic lids and a carrot that Sarah brought along for him while Sarah and I ate our lunches. Dalla spent her time waiting for hand-outs and patrolling the nearby greenery for critters.

After an hour or so we brought our picnic gear back the to car, changed into our hiking boots, and hit the trail. Sarah put Garrison into a new baby carrier that she made and he was asleep relatively rapidly (he didn’t manage to take a nap in the morning so he was pretty cranky and tired by then). She hauled his sleeping self uphill for the better part of a mile as we climbed up the East Bluff Woods trail. At the top she transferred him to me and I put him in the baby backpack that we have. He spent the rest of the hike on my back and most of the time he was asleep.

The weather was extremely pleasant, with temperatures in the upper seventies and sunshine. A handful of trees were turning, and many of the plants on the forest floor were browning up, heralding the arrival of fall in the next couple of weeks.

After hiking for a couple of hours, we started back to Madison. Everyone, except Garrison, was tired from hauling water, food, and/or an infant on their back up and down the bluffs. We took the scenic route back to Madison, with the windows down the entire way, and took the Merrimac Ferry across the Wisconsin River. We had to wait twenty minutes or so to get on-board, but it made for a pleasant end to our trip.

There are a few photos from the trip in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Now that Garrison has started at day care, we have our own personal disease vector. He came down with a runny nose and the sneezes over the weekend and it wasn’t more than a day or two until both Sarah and I were sick, as well. When he first got sick, he would sleep for more than an hour or so in his crib until the mucus would inhibit his ability to breathe which, naturally enough, woke him up. We traded off turns keeping an eye on him, so one or the other of us was up all night for the most part. Eventually, I got wise to the problem and stuck some rolled up blankets under one end of his crib mattress. Once I laid him down on his back with his head slightly elevated, his breathing eased and he was able to sleep for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, we’re all still varying degrees of sick.

Garrison also started to refuse any sort of bottle, sippy cup, or solid food over the weekend from either of us over the weekend. He generally refuses bottles from the ladies at day care, but would eat solid foods when they were offered by the teachers, however. This flat-out refusal of both went on until Tuesday evening when Sarah, with great effort, was able to get him to eat some solids again. Wednesday afternoon we took him in to see a nurse practitioner. She did all the requisite poking, prodding, listening, and examining before declaring that he had ear infections and that they were likely the reasons that he was refusing the bottle. She said that we could put him on antibiotics or wait and it would likely clear up in four to seven days. The fact that he was eating again likely meant that it was clearing up already, so we decided to wait (prescription in hand, should we need it).

He’s still quite actively refusing to be fed by me. Wednesday night Sarah went to the grocery store and he woke up shortly after she left. He absolutely refused to even consider the bottles I made for him, so he had no choice but to scream his little heart out until Sarah got back. That wasn’t fun for Garrison or me.

It’s certainly been a while since I wrote in this space, and a whole bunch of things have happened since then. In fact, so many things have happened that I’m not sure where to start. So, I’ll write down news as it comes to mind. Order in this instance does not imply importance. That is, if I thought of something before something else, that doesn’t make the first more important than the second.

Garrison started day care last week. He’s now in day care Tuesdays and Thursdays. The school has a picture on their website if you’re interested in what his room looks like. He’s probably the biggest baby in his class, though there is one older than him by a couple of weeks. He seems to like it there, though he’s currently having trouble concentrating on his bottles there. His sold food goes down fairly easily, but he get so distracted by all the goings-on around him that he sometimes comes home with just as much milk as he had when we dropped him off.

He’s also creeping towards crawling. He has figured out how to get from a sitting position onto his belly without smacking his face on the floor in the process, as well as how to roll around the room and move backwards and forwards. He moves backwards by lying on his belly and pushing with his hands; he moves forwards by lying on his belly and pushing forwards (generally off something) with his feet. We’ve already started baby-proofing the house since it is obvious that he’s going to be a real terror once he’s fully mobile. Tuesday, I had him ready to go to day care and I put him on the floor near the garage door while I put a collar on the dog. As I was putting the collar on Dalla, I heard the tell-tale “splish-splish” of little hands playing in the dog’s water dish. Then, I heard the metallic splash that the dog’s water dish makes when an infant pulls it over. Finally, I heard the squalling of a wet baby who was lying in a rapidly expanding puddle of dog water. He’s gotten into cabinets, has discovered that some furniture is on wheels (very fun to push and pull), and is already eying other areas where he can cause trouble.

Dalla remains very tolerant of Garrison and his shenanigans. She never threatens him with nipping or biting, even when he pulls chunks of fur out of her tail. She often moves away from him if he ends up near her and we’re not handy to patrol his grabby fists, but otherwise is doing quite well with the invasion of her den. She is also busy doing her best to remove varmints from the face of the planet. She got another rabbit a few weeks ago and caught a mouse recently, as well.

We pulled all the tomato plants out of our garden a week ago due to an infestation of late blight on the plants and fruit. That was very disappointing because we were on track to have a bumper crop this year and now we’ve got almost none left.

On the upside, we’re still getting a good number of oversized zucchini, some cucumbers, broccoli, kohlrabi, raspberries, and peppers. There are some pumpkins on the pumpkin plants and some butternut squash that will hopefully ripen later this fall. The tomatillo plant looks like it will still produce a good crop. I harvested my hops a couple of weeks ago. Due to a lawn mowing mishap, I didn’t get as many as I hoped, but I still got some. I should get a bigger crop next year.

On the brewing front, I recently invested some money in a fairly large, all-grain brewing system that I bought off someone who didn’t brew any longer. Using grain instead of extract should help me to make a wider range of beers more cheaply. For instance, I used to spend somewhere around $20 per batch for extract and specialized grains. Using an all-grain system, I can expect to spend somewhere in the range of $6-10 per batch on fermentables and get better results.

We visited South Dakota a couple of weekends ago and stopped to visit some relatives on the way back. It’s a long drive both ways and I spent the whole time wondering why anyone would rather drive than sit on a train.

Sarah’s parents visited us in July and we took a day to drive up to EAA’s AirVenture in OshKosh. While past years have been quite fun, this year was something of a dud due to rain. It was also the first full-day of the show and many of the unique aircraft the show draws had not yet made their appearance. I’m definitely going again in the future, but I would rather go on Friday than on Monday. We took Garrison with us, and he wasn’t too impressed. I brought along some hearing protection for him, because some of the flybys are pretty loud. When I put the muffs on his head, the first thing he did was take them off, which meant that it became a struggle between the two of us and neither one was happy as a result.

We helped my sister move in mid-August from a duplex on the southwest side of Madison to a home near us. Her new house is a Lustron, which is a type of metal house built after WWII. It’s got big windows and plenty of light inside which is a bit of a change from her last place. The neighborhood is also a bit nicer.

We’ve had an extremely mild summer this year, which has been great for personal comfort. We’ve probably only run the air conditioner five or six days all summer. This week, in particular, has been great with sunny skies and temperatures in the lower to mid seventies. It’s a bit like an extended Indian summer.

For those interested parties, I’m not planning on visiting the South Pole this year. I’m on the passenger manifest as an alternate to the alternate, which is just fine with me.

The weekend after Memorial Day is a bit of a dead time here in Madison. There aren’t any big festivals (none that we care about, at least), and not much else is going on. So, we took advantage of the down time to make a trip to Mt. Horeb for the afternoon on Sunday.Our original plan was to visit Mineral Point, which is about an hour away. Garrison disagreed with that plan once we got into the car, so we pulled off in Mt. Horeb (twenty minutes into the drive) and called it good. We ate lunch at the Grumpy Troll brewery, which I had been planning to do at some undefined time in the future for some time now. We made the obligatory visit to the Mustard Museum and bought unusual mustards, and generally had a pleasant afternoon together before heading back to Madison.

Garrison is still developing well. He’s rolling all over the place now since he easily rolls front to back and vice versa. He has trouble when he goes back to front since he often ends up with one arm pinned beneath him when he arrives on his stomach. Other than that, however, he’s got the rolling over thing down. In fact, we can’t leave him unattended on the floor in certain areas now or his rolling will quickly bring him into contact with things that he’d likely put in his mouth.

We gave him his first solid foods on 30 May 2009 when he had his first serving of rice cereal. He took to it like a champ, though he seems to wear as much as he eats. So far, he’s gotten just three servings of the cereal while we make sure that it ’s agreeing with his still developing digestive tract.

Sarah went back to work today, which meant that I was Mr. Mom for the day. Actually, I’ll be Mr. Mom every Monday and Tuesday until September, while Sarah will be home with Garrison every Thursday and Friday during that period. Finding child care that is affordable, trustworthy, and reasonably conveniently located has so far proven to be a tough nut to crack. So, I’m using up some of my accumulated vacation and Sarah is working just part time. Hopefully, we’ll have some sort of permanent day care lined up come September.

Observant readers may have noticed that we’re seemingly leaving Garrison in Dalla’s care on Wednesdays. Actually, we’ve hired a nanny to come watch him on Wednesday while we’re both at work. Sarah conducted a search and found one of the local undergraduates that she trusts to keep the boy alive, the dog alive, and the house from burning down for eight hours every Wednesday. I wasn’t aware of the distinction between a baby sitter and a nanny until I naively inquired as to how the search for a baby sitter was progressing, but I now understand that we’ve hired a nanny.

Memorial Day has come and gone, but we tried to use the time as best we could.Getting our garden in the ground is always an effort for us. Some years we put it in early, take a trip, and come home to find the whole mess choked with weeds. Other years it takes us a bit of extra time to get it in because of a trip we take in May. This year was one of the latter. Because we went to Cleveland a couple of weeks ago, we didn’t get our garden in the ground until Memorial Day weekend. We’ve got an expanded garden this year because we’re using space that used to be under a spruce tree we had removed. We’re not growing anything too unusual this year. Tomatoes, cukes, kohlrabi, pumpkins, eggplants, green beans, zucchini, lettuce, sweet peppers, hot peppers, dill, basil, mint, oregano, and broccoli are the ones that come to mind. I’m also growing some hops for brewing (Cascades, Sunbeams, Willamettes, Mt. Hood, and Kent Goldings), but I’m not expecting to get a substantial harvest of cones from those until next year. Most everthing that would interest rabbits has been fenced off, which means that we should actually get some kolrabi and broccoli this year. Dalla is 100% effective at stopping rabbit browsing of the garden, but she’s only in the yard 15-20% of the time, so we still have to put out chicken wire.

Garrison went in for his four month doctor’s appointment recently. He’s still in the 70+ percentile for his age in weight, head diameter, and length. He got some more vaccinations, which put him into a nasty mood for the evening, but he was mostly over that by the next day.

Lest anyone think we forgot, we made our obligatory trip to Brat Fest over Memorial Day. As part of the successful effort to eat over 200,000 brats, Sarah and I each consumed three sausage tubes on Saturday. Garrison managed to sleep through his first Brat Fest, which I suspect he won’t do next year when he’s older.

Memorial Day, we decided to take some time off of working around the house and hike some of the trails at Devil’s Lake State Park. The weather was generally favorable and we brought a picnic so that we could leave the house a bit earlier. The park was crowded with people enjoying the last gasps of Memorial Day weekend, but we still found plenty of space for ourselves. The pictures below were taken during our hike.

Garrison, Dalla, and David

Dalla

Sarah and Garrison

It must be Spring because our lawn is a sea of dandelions. Last night our lawn got the first mowing of the Spring, Summer, and Fall seasons. Only 50% of the lawn actually needed to be mowed, but that 50% was distributed randomly around the entire property, so I ended up mowing the whole thing anyway. At a minimum, it cut the dandelions down to size for twelve hours or so.On the upside, our patio furniture is outside once again, and we had our first multi-family cookout on the patio a few weeks ago. There is so much more room to entertain on the patio, compared to our dining room, that it is easier to have larger groups of people over. The charcoal grill has been restored to its place of primacy and the gas grill relegated to usage on rainy days or for quick, small grillings.

Dalla has been reveling in the arrival of Spring since we’ve gotten in the habit of leaving both the patio door and the screen door open in what we refer to as our “open door policy”. Since there aren’t any mosquitoes out yet, we don’t mind having the screen door open to the yard. She loves running in and out as the urge strikes her.

Dalla upped her prey-tally this season by two mice and a rabbit. The mice she caught under our recycling bin; the rabbit was dumb enough to wander into the yard during early evening. She saw it and went sprinting out after it. Unfortunately, it was too big to fit through the chainlink fence, and couldn’t easily go under it. The rabbit was just halfway under the fence when Dalla caught up to it, so the struggle devolved into a contest to see if she could keep it in our yard or if the rabbit could struggle away into a neighbor’s yard where Dalla couldn’t follow. Given Dalla’s advantages of weight, strength, and grip (she had the rabbit’s hind quarters in her mouth), the contest was all but predetermined in her favor. After she ended the struggle, I rewarded her with a couple of treats, and the rabbit carcass joined the mice in our trash bin. With so many dead animals in our trash, we might have to rename the trash can the “carcass bin.”

The birds are back in our neighborhood, including some that we haven’t had in the past. Some white-crowned sparrows have been making an extended stay in our yard on their way north for the summer. An Eastern Towhee, which I’ve never seen in our yard before, has been hanging around for the better part of a week. I also put some sparrow-excluders on my birdhouses this year, which has encouraged some chickadees and wrens to check out the potential nesting spaces. It’s nice to have the wrens back this year. I enjoy listening to their songs much more than the cardinals’ endless braying.

As part of my ongoing descent into homebrewing madness, I planted five different varieties of hops in our yard this year. The hops are planted along our fences, so that they can use the fences for strength and guidance. This year’s harvest will likely be lean, but next year’s should bring an abundance (likely an overabundance) of hops that I can use in my own brewing endeavors.

Garrison is still a herky-jerky three-and-one-half month old. He doesn’t have much in the way of fine motor control yet, though he’s started reaching for objects and may even have a favorite toy or two. He likes to sing, coo, and howl in the morning and during dinner time, unless he’s sitting on someone’s lap. Putting him down for bed is still a real chore since he seems to think that he might never wake up if he falls asleep. However, Sarah (with whatever minor assistance I can offer) soldiers bravely onward and he generally gets to bed by 21:30 every night. When he’s upset, Sarah is clearly his favorite person, and that makes getting him ready for bed a major component of her evenings. We’ve been trying to read him books, but, of course, he can’t actually understand the words we speak. Regardless, he likes to smack the pages of the books with his hands. Since we had a real Dr. Seuss deficit (i.e., none), I bought him a twelve book omnibus that contains many of Geisel’s best known works like, “The Lorax”, “The Cat in the Hat”, “Green Eggs and Ham”, and nine or so others. His physical growth continues unchecked. He’s doubled his birth weight and is now over two feet long.

Sarah has been keeping herself busy with keeping Garrison fed, happy, and alive. She has been diligently seeking day care for him that is reasonably priced, somewhat conveniently located, and staffed by caring individuals. As anyone who has looked for daycare can likely attest, finding care that meets those three simple criteria is not easy. She is also looking forward to getting back to work come June 1st. She recently attended a professional convention here in Madison while I looked after Garrison for the day. She said it felt good to be back amongst professionals, but that she also missed her time with Garrison.

With the arrival of the vernal equinox, we’re starting to get some real signs of Spring.Almost all of the snow around town is gone. The big snow mountains that get built in large parking lots in all their brown and grey glory stubbornly refuse to melt, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a lawn with snow on it. Unfortunately, the date of last frost is still a good two months off, and the ground is distressingly soggy, so working in the gardens is out of the question. Regardless, we brought in our garden tools and lawn mower blade to be sharpened this week. We don’t want to be caught off-guard by the arrival of weeds and green grass. The screens were reinstalled on the windows this week and we had the windows open on both Saturday and Sunday as the temperatures here were in the sixties. It’s always a revelation to have the fresh air blowing through the house again.

Garrison went to the doctor this week for this two month appointment. He weighs north of 12 pounds and is now 23 1/4 inches long. All of his measurements are at the 61st percentile or higher for babies of his age, so he’s growing right on schedule. One of Sarah’s doctors labeled him ‘verbally precocious’ several weeks ago as he’s making all manner of coos, goos, and other baby talk. Apparently, many babies his age are still grunting while he’s practically singing already. But, lest we get too caught up in his verbal abilities, Sarah recently met another baby about Garrison’s age who can already turn himself over, something that Garrison hasn’t figured out yet and doesn’t seem too keen on practicing.

As part of that appointment, he got his two month immunizations, something he greeted with a full-throated roar. Can’t say that I blame him, really. Getting stuck three times in the thighs wouldn’t be my idea of a good time either. Fortunately, he didn’t suffer any of the dreaded side effects (‘inconsolable crying for three hours or longer’), and he is just fine despite his most recent encounter with modern medicine.

My sister has been kind enough to do some babysitting for us, which has been great. We recently got to take in Richard Shindell’s concert here in Madison when Amy babysat Garrison for us. Shindell’s show was very good, much better than the Springsteen show that we saw in St. Paul last year. Shindell was much more engaging and spontaneously and had a much better rapport with the audience. I’m not ready to pass judgment on his new album because I haven’t listened to it much.

I’m finally healthy again after a bout with a nasty cold that kept me out of work for several days and kept me feeling less than 100% for more than a week. Fortunately, neither Sarah or Garrison caught whatever it was that I had.

Since I last wrote in this space, both my Mom and Dad have been out to visit and meet their grandchild. Both were kind enough to do some babysitting for us so that we could run some errands and take in a couple of hockey games.

Finally, there are some new photos in the Photo Gallery for those interested parties.