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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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

Last night after giving Garrison his bath, I went to the garage door, expecting to find Dalla waiting to come in from the outside. Normally, she’s ready to come back inside during the winter after just five or ten minutes by herself outside. In this instance, she’d been outside for more than twenty without a peep. I went to the door that separates the garage from the yard and whistled for her several times. Eventually, she came trotting towards the house from the dark yard. Even with her success over the past year killing rabbits, voles, and mice in the yard I was surprised to see her carrying the item pictured below in her mouth.

She was happy to drop the carcass and come indoors, so I let her into the house. She ran to the other end of the house and got some praise from Sarah and Garrison. That’s when Sarah noticed that Dalla had fleas on her neck that she most likely picked up from the rabbit. So, it was into the bath for her and I got to give my second bath of the evening.

One of my biggest fears going into this winter was that we’d be stuck indoors for several months with a tornado of destruction masquerading as a two year old.  So far, that hasn’t been the case.  We’ve been able to get Garrison enough time outdoors that he’s been able to keep a relatively level head.

Today, for instance, we took him hiking on an Ice Ge Trail segment south of Madison that is relatively flat and easy to navigate.  Garrison was a real trouper and while he isn’t the fastest walker on uneven surfaces, he doesn’t lack for enthusiasm.  He walked for quite a while before finally getting tired and asking to ride in his backpack carrier.

The segment we walked runs along a creek that isn’t frozen yet.  After we told Garrison that we might see ducks, he spent the rest of the walk yammering in his two year-old way about ducks.  When we did see some ducks he was thrilled and that redoubled his chatter about ducks.  It was a bit like walking with a slightly incoherent waterfowl enthusiast.

The walking did tire him out, however. Once we got back into the car and the heater warmed things up he passed right out until we got home.

Over the past month, we’ve gotten in the habit of having 5-10 M&Ms, each, after dinner.  Tonight, Sarah cooked chicken parm for dinner.  Garrison at two pieces of pasta, one piece of broccoli, one bite of chicken, and called it a meal.  No amount of cajoling or encouragement could get him to eat any more.  Finally, we gave up.  When we were finished, Sarah and I broke out the M&Ms and had a few.  Garrison immediately wanted his.  We told him repeatedly that people who don’t eat dinner don’t get dessert.  Eventually, we came around to the position that if he ate his pasta he could have dessert.  This clearly wasn’t the bargain he wanted, but he really desired those bits of candy so he grudgingly ate his pasta.  Once he was done and he got his M&Ms, he was thrilled that we kept our part of the bargain.   Both Sarah and I were left wondering how much this sort of stubbornness/ultimatum/bargaining around food is going to be part of our future.

It’s been a busy couple of months for us and I haven’t even been able to hold to my unstated goal of posting at least once a month in this space.

Shortly after my last post, we made Memphis-style ribs for my sister’s birthday using a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. We’ve made ribs plenty of times in the past, and we’ve gotten some pretty variable results. There is a definite relationship between the amount of effort we’re willing to expend, the cuts of meat that we use, and the quality of the final product. In this case, the amount of effort required wasn’t very high, the cuts of meat (St. Louis-style ribs) weren’t terribly expensive, but the results were phenomenal. I highly recommend that recipe to anyone who enjoys ribs.

In mid-September, we took a trip to visit my family in South Dakota. That was the first very long car trip that we’ve taken with Garrison since he was just a little infant. We managed to schedule the time in the car so that he wouldn’t be awake for some of it, but it still required plenty of stops at playgrounds along the way for everyone to stay sane.

Garrison seemed to enjoy himself in South Dakota. My mom took care of him for a night, which let Sarah and I take a one-night vacation; that was the first time both of us had spent a night without him in the house since he was born.

Garrison’s language development continues apace. He loves words that end in hard ‘K’ sounds. Only, he likes to say them with a particularly harsh, phlegmy sounding ‘chk’ at the end. People have asked us if we speak German at home because his pronunciation of the hard ‘K’ sound is so phlegmy. For instance, when Sarah’s parents were here last weekend Garrison picked up the word ‘hawk’. Of course, he says it ‘haw-chk’. He’s also got ‘stuc-chk’, ‘duc-chk’, and his most commonly used word, ‘mo-chk’ (which is milk).

He now routinely calls us ‘Ma Ma’, and ‘Da Da’. That’s been a relatively recent change. He also now says things like, ‘Hi, Da Da’ when he returns if he knows you stayed home while he went somewhere or if you enter a room and he hasn’t seen you for a while.

Dalla is pronounced with a strong Spanish influence as ‘Dai-ya’. He particularly loves yelling at and for the dog. At least once a day he says, “No, no, Dai-ya” as she waits around his chair to clean up his mess. (Dalla, for her part, doesn’t acknowledge that form of her name any more than she does any other derivation of the name Dalla.) The other night we were all chanting Dalla’s name and she got pretty worried to hear her name used so much.

Garrison now often says ‘stuc-chk’ when he’s stuck or when something else is stuck that he’d like to manipulate. Of course, he still sometimes goes straight to yelling and screaming and then if you ask him what’s wrong, he says, ‘stuc-chk’. In the last week or so, water has become ‘non-non’, I’m not sure why. A horse is a ‘bum, bum’. Almost all birds on the grounds are ducks. Birds in the air are hawks. Fire hydrants, fire trucks, ambulances, and any other vehicle of sufficient size that is fire engine red in color is a ‘wow-wow’. He’s also come up with ‘wet’, ‘Go away, Dai-ya’, ‘root (roof)’, and ‘hot’ for coffee.

Garrison has a placemat that’s covered in dinosaurs and he was pointing at them the other day and I was naming them “seismosaurus, allosaurus, triceratops”, etc. Then, he pointed to the stegosaurus and I named it. He said, ‘duc-chk’. I named it again. He named it as a duck again. That continued for a couple more iterations and I gave up. I asked him about it the the next day, and he named it as a duck again. When I showed that to Sarah, she said, “Well, they are descended from birds.”

Sarah’s family visited us two weeks ago and her parents seemed to enjoy their time with our family. My mother is visiting us this week and she’s helping us out by babysitting several days while our day care is closed.

Curling starts up again this week. I’m now curling on Tuesday evenings and Sarah is curling on Thursdays. I’ll have a new skip for the first time in eight years. Every other year, I’ve played with the same skip, so this will truly be a new season for me.

We’ve been making slow but sure progress towards getting the house and yard ready for winter. The gardens are all done, so we took out the plants and replaced them with leaf mulch. The hanging baskets are all taken down and stowed in the garage. We are in the midst of getting a new sidewalk in the front of the house and are also getting a sidewalk poured from the front drive to the patio in the back. We’d walked on that ground so much and it was so compacted as a result that nothing could grow on it. The sidewalk will also be easier to clean off in the winter when it snows because we’ll be able to use the snow thrower. In years past, we would use the snow thrower and then shovel out a path by hand to the back yard.

There are a handful of new Garrison pictures in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Summer is winding down here in Madison but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy.

Two weeks ago, we visited the Sweet Corn Festival in Sun Prairie, which is about a half-hour from our house. We’d never been to the Sweet Corn Festival, even though we’d heard about it for years. This year, for whatever reason, we finally decided to go. It was cheap to get in ($5 for parking which includes admission), and they practically give away the corn ($6 for a so-called tote, which in our case held ten ears). We then spent a couple of bucks as a tip for someone to butter some of the corn for us. Sarah and I also got six-inch subs for $2 each. We had a dinner packed for Garrison because he hasn’t developed a taste for corn yet, and we brought water so that was the extent of our spending for the evening. We got more corn than we could eat in one sitting, had a picnic on a hill listening to some live music, and Garrison got to have fun in a petting zoo. For whatever reason, even though it doesn’t sound like much fun, we all had a good time.

Last weekend we met friends at the Capital Brewery Bier Garten. It had been two years since we’d last visited, and so we were surprised to find that they’d added a large canopy over much of the garden. That greatly improved the experience because previously, it was basically a bunch of picnic tables on a big concrete slab with the brewery (and bar) at one end and a stage at the other. With the canopy, it is now possible to enjoy yourself on sunny, hot days. Our friends, Paul and Ashely, brought their 17-month-old son Finn, and we were all happy to watch the boys play together, rather than just near each other. They chased each other around a tree, threw toys together, and generally entertained themselves well enough that the adults were able to enjoy some beer and adult conversation.

After giving up brewing for a couple of months because we anticipated moving, I’m trying to get back in the habit. A week or so ago I brewed up an English IPA and I’m hoping to brew up a red ale this weekend. I also recently started a small batch of hard cider.

Dalla has been busy catching and killing the varmints in our back yard. The other night she caught another rabbit, flushing it out of the hostas in our back yard, chasing it to the fence, and killing it in front of all of us. Garrison didn’t quite understand what was going on, but he sure thought it was exciting watching her tear around the yard.

Sarah just finished with a month-long “boot camp” exercise program. For a month, she’d been getting up at 05:00 three times a week to exercise with a group in a local park. Having tried it when we lived in California, I can safely say that I won’t be joining her for any pre-dawn workouts any time soon.

On another note, there are some new photos of Garrison in the Photo Gallery.

Another month has passed and we’ve been busy all the while.

We’ve been seemingly living underneath a huge garden sprinkler all summer as we’ve had rain more days than not. And when we get rain, it’s often in non-trivial quantities. Along with the rain, we’ve had a good number of very hot and humid days. As you might expect given those conditions, there are plenty of mosquitoes around this year. It’s gotten so bad that if we want to go out into the yard, everyone (except Dalla) has to put bug spray on their arms, legs, and head. Garrison’s head is particularly susceptible. If we don’t get bug spray on his head soon enough, he gets big red bites all over his forehead, cheeks, and neck.

The garden has been enjoying this weather for the most part. We’ve been drowning in zucchini again this year, even after giving away several to friends and coworkers. The tomatoes have been a bit late in coming, but now they’re finally starting to come in. For the first time ever, the tomato plants on the south side of our house got so big that they fell over and pulled their cages with them. After last year’s cucumber explosion, we didn’t plant any this year and that hasn’t been a terrible mistake. Some of the hot peppers are getting nice and ripe, but we have yet to get any green beans. I guess that’s the interesting aspect of gardening, you never know exactly how it’s all going to turn out.

Sarah and I planted a Zestar apple tree in our yard three years ago. This year is the first year that it’s produced any fruit. We harvested one of the two apples the tree produced this year (it’s still pretty small), and ate it last night. It was a really tasty apple. We have high hopes for next year.

Two weeks ago I took a day off of work and went up to Oshkosh for the annual AirVenture air show. I really enjoy listening to the interesting and varied speakers that give talks in the forums there. The airplanes are interesting, but it’s the speakers that keep me coming back. The most engaging speaker I heard this year was Bob Richards, the author of Secrets From the Tower. He’s definitely a character. The airplanes at the show this year were OK. The Air Force showed up with their version of the VF-22 Osprey and with a large array of cargo planes. There was the big DC-3 show, and a few other planes of interest, but not as many as in years past. Quite frankly, if the Air Force hadn’t been there, Aeroshell Square would have been a bit empty this year.

The day after AirVenture, Sarah, Garrison, Dalla, and I drove west to Governor Dodge State Park to spend the day. We had a nice walk on one of the park’s numerous hiking trails before sitting down to a picnic lunch on a hillside overlooking Cox Hollow lake. Garrison really seemed to enjoy the novelty of eating outdoors and on a blanket where he could get up and wander off to look at the lake any time the urge struck him.

The weekend after that, we went to the Wisconsin State Fair. I can’t say why I get the urge to visit the Fair every year, but I do. We did many of the obligatory State Fair things like eat deep fried food on a stick (cherry pie, in our case), visit all the livestock barns, jostle arms with thousands of our fellow Wisconsin residents, and bake in the heat and humidity.

Last weekend we made our annual trek to the Twin Cities to visit with friends and family. Once again, Garrison surprised us with how easily he took to the travel. He slept well in the hotels where we stayed, and wasn’t a complete terror when we ate in restaurants. We took him to the Como Park Zoo on Friday morning where he reinforced for us his dislike and perhaps fear of some large, land-bound animals. He enjoys watching animals in the water but large animals like gorillas and orangoutangs are definitely not on his favorite list. Regardless, he seemed to enjoy himself there. He may not have understood all that was going on around him, but he did his best to copy everyone else he saw by going up to every window and railing and peering over or through to what might be beyond.

We are extremely fortunate to have generous friends in the Cities who opened their homes to us both Friday and Saturday afternoon. Both days we were able to let Garrison nap on their beds while we ate lunch, which made the trip much, much easier for all concerned. Once he woke up, he was then able to burn off some energy playing in their yard or with their kids.

Saturday night, my Mom watched Garrison for us so that Sarah and I could take in a St. Paul Saints game. In short, the game experience is OK, but the Madison Mallards put on a better show. The Mallards have better food, better party spaces, better beer, seats closer to the game, lower seat prices, and better between innings entertainment. It was good to see what all the fuss is about, but I’ll take a Mallards game over a Saints game any day.

The original plan was for my Mom and I to take in a Twins game at Target Field on Friday night while Sarah watched Garrison at the hotel. Unfortunately, both Sarah and I were so wiped out by our drive up to the Cities on Thursday night (we arrived around 01:00 and woke up around 06:00), that we both passed out around 21:00. It will have to be next year for me to visit Target Field.

Garrison continues to grow and develop. He has become an absolutely voracious devourer of books. More specifically, he wants us to read him book after book after book. We’re making heavy use of our library cards and the toddler and picture book sections as a result. He definitely knows more words than he can speak at this point. His most recent word is probably “dooooowwwwnn” for “down”. He’s also starting to play with toys a bit more. He spends more time playing with his various plastic trucks every day, which gives us a chance every now and then to get dinner on the table or do some other household chore.

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.