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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Who forgot to snap my onesie?

Diaper Change Failure

Photos of Garrison at eleven and twelve months are now available in the Photo Gallery.

Garrison’s ten month video is now up on YouTube.

New photos of Garrison at ten months are available in the Photo Gallery for interested parties.

Our next story here on GNN (the Garrison News Network): a new video on YouTube shows some scenes from Garrison’s life at nine months.

More photos in the Photo Gallery. The most recent set features photos taken during our visits to local state parks and natural areas during the month of October.