Wit Over Ignorance

Who is that masked man ?

To whichever member of his family picked up his camera and sneaked this shot, you have been warned: the masked man (and his donkey) will have their revenge.......

Splash

Yes, folks, it's that time of year again. The Allen-Mills water babies head for the pool, where they stay until September. Prepare to be splashed !

Pig-bashing

No modern American birthday is complete without a piñata, a Mexican papier-maché confection that turns small children into homicidal thugs. I'm not entirely sure how a generation of parents came to think it was appropriate for howling packs of six-year-olds to take blunt objects to a defenceless pig (or goat, or donkey or any number of cute, defenceless creatures) in the hope of splitting them apart and then fighting over their contents (usually a handful of cheap chocolates and several small plastic toys manufactured in Taiwan). But hey, what our little darlings want, they get, right ? Shortly after the adorable first picture below was taken, those cute little kids picked up iron bars and took it in turns to smash the pig to pieces. And to our undying shame, we cheered them on....

 

Meeting the prez

Anouk's number one friend from New Jersey was in town, so naturally we took him to see the sights. And who should we bump into but the prez himself. He was busy flogging T-shirts at a souvenir stand in Old Town, Alexandria. Apparently the US economy is in worse shape than we thought. Tristan was very impressed. Anouk thinks her Dad is much better looking. She's right, too.

Chez Mr Cheese

The trouble is, when you ask a 6-year-old American girl (even one who's half-French and half-English) where she wants to take her sisters for a birthday party, the answer (once you've excluded the impractical, the unaffordable and the illegal) is always Chuck E. Cheese. For those of you who have never heard of America's suburban cartoon mouse rip-off, Mr Cheese is a kind of amusement arcade-pizzeria imitation of Mickey. His small, overcrowded, deafening entertainment emporia are the closest you get to hell as a parent. Yet somehow, all four of my daughters have succumbed to his cheesy attractions, and even my older pair, long past the peak age (6) for Chuck E. visits, declared themselves thrilled to be paying a nostalgic return to a much-loved haunt of their youth.  Needless to say, they all had a ball.

   

That birthday in full (1)

I'm a bit slow, as usual, getting these loaded. The one thing that occurred to me, looking through my shots from Anouk's birthday a couple of weeks ago, is that at some point in their lives women go from pink to black. I wonder why this happens. I wonder if there's an actual moment you can photograph, when your daughter discards her beloved pink ensemble and climbs into a black outfit for the first time. I must reflect upon this some more.

The sisters had a ball on the Big Day, and there's more to come after this: