Many times while hiking, particularly while descending a mountain, I’ve noticed a trickle of spring water that crosses the trail now and then, enough to catch my eye but still small enough to step over.  Then my thoughts wander and I pass a few more of them, but eventually I realize that the trickles have joined into a stream which grows each time I cross it, and that it has become a new feature in the landscape.  So it has been with Everett and words.  He started with just a couple here and there, and even then he didn’t really use them consistently.  One of his first was no (“Noo! Noo! Noo!” to be exact), soon followed by dog and cat, then duck.  For a while after this almost everything of affection fell somewhere on the duck-cat spectrum.  Ultimately he realized that the universe has more dimensions than can be captured on a line between cats and ducks and has now shown us his solution to the binding problem.  In particular, what is it about duck-ness or dog-ness that makes paintings, photos, lawn ornaments, plastic likenesses and the real thing all representations of the same animal, and how do you decide whether a new animal like a seagull or wolf falls into an existing category or requires a new word?  At this point he usually chooses the latter and is adding a couple new words a day that encompass parents, parts of the body, animals (with appropriate sounds), foods, clothing and exclamations such as “woah!” or “hooyeah!” (which he uses when we are launching rockets in the backyard).  This process is fascinating to watch.  Of course, by the time his spoken vocabulary started to grow we suspected that we had underestimated him, in particular how much he understands.  We have heard many times that children’s receptive language skills come long before their expressive skills.  For example, some friends of ours have a boy who, by the time he started to talk, thought the cat’s name was “Damn It Clyde”.  In our case we realized that we really had no idea how much language he knew so we started quizzing him on the location of body parts, household items, animals, whether things were hot and cold, etc.  Encouraged by some good success we next started giving him commands like “bring me my wallet”, “close the gate” or “put your toothbrush in your other hand”, and we were proud but surprised when he complied.  We have now accepted the fact that we really have no way of knowing how much he understands and will have to rely on clues that he provides, like today when our friend Amanda said the word “cow” in the course of conversation and Everett interjected “moo!” without being prompted.  Other clues are not so subtle, such as his reaction to bubbles, which he has grown quite fond of since discovering them earlier this summer.  Actually that is a bit of an understatement – he is crazy for them as you can see here:

Everett was born into a family that takes delight in words.  For example, we were originally going to call this website “sesquipedalia”, which is loosely defined as using a $10 word when a 10 cent word would have worked just fine, although this was ultimately rejected because it seemed too difficult to spell.  We also keep two dictionaries at the dining room table and use them daily.  So we are glad to see that Everett is similarly enthusiastic about words.  What remains to be seen is whether his stream of words will turn into a gently flowing river or a series of fast-moving rapids, or how far this analogy can be taken when comparing him to his parents.

A few days ago was the annual Kavanaugh block party (photo above).  It’s pretty much what you would expect for a block party: close the road and fill the empty space with tables, chairs, grills, a keg and a potluck buffet.  Then sit and visit with the neighbors.  But there were also some things you might not expect, like last year’s frozen t-shirt contest (a race among the children to see who was the fastest at donning a t-shirt that has been soaked, folded and frozen solid), or the annual dog race.  As far as I know the latter was Dan Johnson’s idea, the same person who made national news for holding a pie fight with one of his high school buddies in the field behind our house.  The dog race used to consist of lining the dogs up (sort of), throwing a ball down the street and seeing who retrieved it first.  But the improved version of the race is to first find a hedgehog such as this one:

then attach it to a rope and reel it in on a motorized drum.  The winner of this year’s race was a rookie named Sprout who made up for his shorter legs with pure focus and tenacity, as you can see from the video below.  He won all heats and all race categories.

And speaking of sprouting, Everett took his first steps today!  We would love to have a movie of this as well but he rarely performs things on demand, especially when the video camera is running.  We’ll keep trying.  In the meantime here is a movie showing one of his other new tricks.

At the end of this video you can hear him correctly identify “bike”, which is a perfect segue into the next blog entry on Words…

Tonight we visited the Harley Davidson Museum for Bike Night, which is a Thursday night tradition during the summer with live music and outdoor food and beer.  This was our first time to the museum and the other visitors were mostly what we expected: lots of black leather, ZZ Top hair and custom motorcycles.  Oddly, there were also a fair number of families with small children and ours was certainly not the only stroller.  The museum grounds are beautiful, with lots of wide open space and riverfront along the Menomonee River.  The statue in the photo above is the centerpiece of the pedestrian plaza.  Tonight was also the christening of the Milwaukee Fire Department’s new boat the Trident (you have to travel a fair bit farther north before they become boots):

And here is the boat with black and orange water cannons as a tribute to the Harley Davidson colors:


We ate at MOTOR, the museum restaurant, which in addition to upscale biker food serves Motor Oil (dark beer) and Motor Gasoline (amber beer).  Both were pretty spicy.  The former was heavy but somewhat sweet, almost like molasses.  The best part was that all drafts are $2 on Thursday nights.  Sitting in the restaurant also allowed me to reflect on several questions I’ve thought about since we moved here such as:

-What is the demographic of Harley riders in Milwaukee?  My observation so far is successful men, post-midlife crisis.

-Will we get a Harley someday if we stay in Milwaukee?  If so, will we wear helmets even though they aren’t required in Wisconsin?

-How would people react if I rode the Pugsley to bike night?  Motorcyclists and bicyclists tend not to be kindred spirits, but Harley riders might feel some affinity for the Pug as long as I’m not wearing spandex.

Everett enjoyed the events but eventually got bored and went for a crawl along the river…

Today we returned to the Wisconsin State Fair for another slice of midwestern Americana.  The fair park is a mile or two from our house and thanks to Wheel and Sprocket it now has bike parking, so we put the family on six wheels (two bikes and the Burley) and pedaled over.  I don’t like using the Burley as a stroller so during our last trip we towed the Bob stroller behind the Burley (not a good idea).  Today we put the Uppababy on top of the Burley.  It’s certainly not in the owner’s manual but it worked well.  Highlights from the trip follow.

We visited the fair with Russ, Lauren and Nora.

In this photo Everett doesn’t seem terribly interested in Nora, but later that evening he grabbed her by the collar and kissed her.  I guess acting cool and distant wasn’t working.

When Everett was born we had all kinds of high ideals about how only healthy, natural food would enter his body.  But over the past year we have relaxed a bit, perhaps even more than we anticipated because today E shared his first corn dog with Dad.  For those who may be unfamiliar, especially our friends in other countries, corn dogs are one of the true American contributions to the culinary world along with cotton candy and the turducken.  And in case you are wondering I do not normally eat them – I think I might have had one in the 1980s.  In any case he seemed to like it quite a bit.

Nora showed us the butterflies on her shirt:

She also went down the world famous Wisconsin giant slide:

And E wore shoes for the first time this summer without screaming:

He also drove a tractor:

And we finished the day with a sunset ride home.

We have developed our first tradition since moving here, which it to visit the parks on Lake Michigan on Sunday evenings for dinner.  This usually entails getting together with some friends or family and taking a picnic to the lakefront in late afternoon, followed by playtime and dinner.  Last week we were enjoying dinner with grandparents Gary and Linda when a bus pulled up and several dozen college mascots jumped out.  We met the Cincinnati Bearcat (and I learned that the bearcat is a real animal known as a Binturong) and the University of Wisconsin Badgers.

We also met the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Panther and the University of Minnesota Golden Gopher.

But my favorite was the unidentified mascot below who has unmistakeable Sean morning hair.

As for Everett, he was a little freaked out by these people but eventually started warming up to them.

Another tradition we started this summer is visiting the Wisconsin State Fair which is held at the fairgrounds about a mile from our house.  It’s all about cream puffs, rock bands from the 1980s and getting in touch with our agricultural roots.  Highlights this year:

1. Chocolate covered bacon on a stick.  Both Melissa and I tried this and had a few thoughts.  First, the chocolate is messy, especially on hot summer afternoons while trying to eat off a stick.  Second, the flavors don’t really mix.  Instead we both tasted chocolate, then bacon, both delicious.

2. The Herb Kohl Milk House, where you can get any flavor of milk (and I do mean ANY flavor) for 25 cents:

3. Timber Tina’s World Champion Lumberjills who performed ax throwing, log cutting and log rolling.  They were fantastic.

A third tradition we participated in is ‘Tosa Night Out, which is a safety fair and concert they hold at Hart Park in early August.  The event ends with an organized flashlight walk at dusk which happens to run in front of our house:

I’ll end this blog entry with a video of Everett’s first bike ride, which will hopefully become another new tradition for us:

Activity on the website has slowed a bit because of some technical problems that surfaced a couple weeks ago and that took some time for me to fix.  Hopefully that is all ironed out now but let me know if you notice any problems.  I’ve added some new photos to Everett’s webpage and made some changes to the home page to make it a bit more informative.  The downside of this is that I need to catch up a bit.

Every once in a while you meet someone who makes you aware of something that is all around you but that you didn’t notice before, and it changes your perception of the world.  For example, many years ago I read An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton, and ever since then I have realized how common collective nouns are, yet how easily they are overlooked (e.g. a flock of seagulls, a school of fish, a catastrophe of debt, etc.).  So it has been also with Everett and ducks: he is an expert at identifying them.  In the photo he is pointing out a couple of them at the petting zoo that came to Hart Park on July 4th.  Nothing too surprising about that, but what’s interesting is that the real ones bear little resemblance to the iconic yellow duckies, yet he readily identifies those in books and toys.  Many times during the day he exclaims “duck!”, and he is usually right even if it takes us a while to find what he is referring to.  He has been finding them in wallpaper borders, lawn ornaments and company logos on books.  Of course he won’t do this on demand, only when he feels like, so it’s difficult to catch on film.  But we managed to catch it once recently as you can see below.