Category: photos

Some day, I will master the focus feature on my Nikon Coolpix. (I wonder when that will be.) But you get the idea.

Tink and Smee/random fearsome pirate.

Pirates like flowers. Who knew?

Please.

MB has been taking 8 mm film of the family when we get together these days. It’s so wonderful, all grainy and shaky with emotion. It’s suggestive, not entirely illustrative, and that’s the beauty of it.

Below are some screen shots I took of his footage from back in March of this year. It’s Original Banshee and I just doing some basic goofing around. I don’t really remember what I was doing or saying but she was just laughing so hard. Her little hand over her mouth is just so cute to me.

I love that girl.

Banshee Girl, our 4-year-old boozehound, looking vague and bombed, sipping the Easter brunch screwdriver that’s clearly being handed to her by some other older boozehound.

Witness the guilty enabling hand!

So sad. Shameful, really. I would have intervened but, eh, I was drunk and her end of the table was really far away.

My dad took the whole family to brunch on Easter Sunday. We sat, all 14 of us, under filtered sunlight in a lovely but slightly too warm atrium. Banshee Boy, whom we now call Happy Jack, was dressed up in his Easter duds, looking almost like a little man if it weren’t for those perfectly round, perfectly smooth, perpetually flushed cheeks. He sat in the highchair the server brought for him and ate torn-off pieces of waffle or pancake or whatever he could stuff in his always smiling, 4-toothed mouth.

He was such a good little boy. Frankly, I always cringe when I’m in a restaurant and diners sitting near me have a baby or a toddler. My thriving inner curmudgeon waits for the screaming or the crying or the food throwing to begin. Once those things do happen, as my inner curmudgeon predicted and possibly even willed just so I’d have something to curmudge about, I scowl openly at the parents who don’t take the child outside or discourage wasteful pancake throwing.

But Happy Jack did none of those things.

Okay. Sure, he did — every few minutes — glance around our table, blue eyes bright with glee, and let out a short little crow of delight that was, yes, a bit loud and kind of high-pitched, but it wasn’t distress or anger or frustration. It didn’t precede a bout of waffle throwing or highchair thrashing. No, the kid would smile big enough to break his apple cheeks and just ….. crow. It was more like a little screech of joy. My brother would dutifully shush him, but the outbursts weren’t sustained enough to necessitate his removal and they weren’t tantrums either. It was just a mini eruption, done with such obvious delight that the diners around us began to smile too. They would poke each other, chuckle, and point to the roly poly little boy in his highchair, expressing his happiness in the only way he could think of:

By crowing.

He actually became quite a popular figure in that lovely but slightly too warm atrium.

And here is our Happy Jack, caught mid crow:

(Banshee Boy on the trampoline with Tee Tee)

In case you haven’t noticed, I have a terrible incurable crush. He is the jolliest baby I have ever seen.