Snort road.

The land surrounding one of the roads near our house is undergoing some major construction and has been for the better part of the summer. Initially they just had a few pieces of equipment on the sides of the road -- dump trucks, excavators, etc. As the project has progressed, more equipment has come to stay and we have now dubbed it "snort road".

What is a snort? You may ask yourself. Why is it called snort road?

Welllll, let me explain. When Evelyn was itty-bitty, Dan's Mom sent her the board book version of "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman. If you are unfamiliar with the story, it is about a little bird who goes searching for his mother. He comes across a few different things -- a cow, a kitten, a dog -- all the while wondering if they are his mother. One thing he encounters is an excavator. He asks the excavator if he is his mother, and the excavator exclaims, "SNORT!"

Image via Google images.

That is how our family came to calling excavators "snorts". To be honest, I had to use my Google skills to figure out the real name of the piece of equipment. I know it is used in construction but the name has never really mattered to me -- until I started writing this entry, that is.

It is a little treat for Evelyn each time we drive down "Snort Road". When we are sitting at the light waiting to turn right, I exclaim, "We're going to go down snort road!" She loves to look at the different snorts and see what they are doing. Sometimes they are "sleeping" (aka not doing anything), other times they are digging, and yesterday she saw one and declared that it was "twirling". Indeed it was twirling but the imagery that went through my head made me giggle -- a Snort with a tutu on, twirling around. If she had said it was spinning I wouldn't have had the same image in my mind.

It'll be a sad day for Evelyn when the construction company packs up their makeshift office and drives all their equipment away.