Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - The Patio, or Excuse Me...

My mother-in-law ("Grandma M.") and her sister ("Aunt D.") came over to visit yesterday so Aunt D. could see the new concrete work that we had done about a month ago. She liked it a lot. Oh, you probably want to see what was done! We had the front steps and half the driveway redone, and we added a colored, stamped patio.


The new patio, brick-colored and stamped with a random stone pattern. We still have lots of landscaping to do.

Ah, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is Rascal. He was very excited to have visitors, especially Aunt D., who he doesn't see very often. Rascal proceeded to talk her ear off the entire time.

Rascal has this little quirk which I'm afraid is his parents' fault. We have taught him to be overly polite, so that he prefaces every statement he makes to relative strangers with "Excuse me...".
This is great, you'd think. You'd be wrong. After the 200th repetition of "excuse me" you start to go nuts. Here's some examples of Rascal:

"Excuse me, my daddy's car has four seats."
"Excuse me, I'm four years old, my baby is one years old, and Mommy is 31 years old."
"Excuse me, we have a patio."

Thankfully Aunt D. took it all in stride. I could see she was starting to find him a little tedious (thanks, Wendy, I can't get it out of my brain now...). When they left I made apologies for him. I just know that this episode will be the talk of the extended family for a while...