The circus!

My friend Brooke, who has more good ideas eight months pregnant than most of us have when we're in fabulous physical and mental shape, organized a backyard circus for the kids. It was darling. And hilarious. Beth was an acrobat (she did Mommy-assisted somersaults and then climbed Daddy) and Sarah was a clown (strictly a sideshow act, but boy did she look cute).

Beth's buddy Eleanor did a magic act (soooo cute to see a two-year-old do magic tricks!) and had this fantastic moment of "Oh, wow, people are paying attention!" when she got applause. There was a brief flirt with being shy about it...and then she just lapped up the attention. What a kid.

(Tangent: My mom sent Beth another round of books and Grandma-reading-books-on-tape, including a really cute one about Gossie and Gertie, two little goslings who are best friends and do everything together. At the end of one of a whole bunch of readings of the story, I asked Beth, "Do you have a best friend?"

Well, duh. "Eleanor!")

Back to the circus. There was an elephant trainer (with a daddy as the elephant), and an unintelligible but quite dapper ringmaster, and a few trained monkeys, and a trapeze artist, and even a tattooed strong man (those tattoos looked suspiciously like Crayola marker, and I heard several remarks about the incongruity of a CTR tattoo). Afterward there was homemade ice cream, and kids running around the backyard, and the sun hadn't even started to go down when we left at 8:00. Ah, summer!