The Tigers Have Spoken

Caleb and Sam are eating like its summer, even if the weather suggests October.


Sam tours Discovery World with Kirsten's Grumpy, Don Pratt, who's visiting from Cincinatti. (Years back, at our wedding rehearsal, Grumpy announced to the congregation that we was looking for a rich woman with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel.)


Grumpy helps Sam learn about leverage.


The Boys at Hooligan's.


Sam volunteers for face-painting by Rhonda the Clown at the South Shore Farmer's Market.


Sam checks Rhonda's work. This kid is going to be huge in the musical theatre. Look out, Aunt Karina...


Like a good twin, Caleb decided to be a tiger, too.


Olin isn't having it.


The tiger, in his natural habitat, stalks his prey in the circle of life: a gigantic strawberry danish from the Mexican bakery.


Sam, still tiger-fied, tries to blow up some impossible balloons at Josie's one-year birthday party.*


Tim and Sam take up a collection from the beanstalk at Grandma and Grampa Lathrop's house. Later, the boys climbed up the stalk, disappeared for awhile, and returned with a hen that lays golden eggs. Now if the golden egg market ever rebounds...


The Great Lakes Tricycle Rally and Smash-Up Derby visits the Milwaukee Colluseum for a once-in-a-lifetime Rack 'Em and Smack 'Em Beatdown! Sunday Sunday, Sunday!


The family with Grumpy. And the beanstalk.

* Saturday, by the way, was a day for strange, Paul Auster-ian coincidences. Another guest at Josie's party, who I'd known from Unitarian church sleepovers years and years before, was the son of the woman who organizes the South Shore Farmer's Market, where we'd been only mintues before!!! At Josie's party, the boys learned how to pop balloons that were small and really difficult to fill with air -- likely they were meant to be water balloons -- and then later, when they wanted to continue popping balloons, they found that Grandma and Grampa Lathrop had the same kind of balloons!!! If Jack Palance were alive today(**), I know just what he'd say: "Believe it . . . or not."

** This trope always brings to mind a favorite couplet from Randy Newman's "The World Isn't Fair": If Karl Marx were alive today / he'd be rolling around in his grave...