With a Rear End Here and a Rear End There...

Yesterday we managed to ward off the slithering tentacles of professional duty and guilt and just hang out with the kids. (For those of you outside the Seattle Public Schools orbit: they weren't at school because it's Spring Break -- yes, even though Easter is two weeks off and it's still 40 degrees -- Argh.) Josie and her friend Willa vanished upstairs and only ventured out of Josie's room briefly, at noon, to consume some mac 'n' cheese. Simon and Arlo spent most of the morning in the treehouse firing stomp rockets at various targets in the yard (including the cat, who was quite outraged at this indignity). At 2 pm we decided we'd regret it if we failed to leave the house before the sun went down, so we hauled everyone out to Kelsey Creek Farm to check on the sheep. (They're fine, it seems. Looking all woolly and more than ready for their big shearing on April 25th -- mark your calendars!)


After we took this picture (Arlo: "Wait, you have to tell us when you're going to take the picture so we can be all ready and stuff!" Me: "Okay! One, two, three... Go!") we loaned our camera to the master face-maker, who proceeded to take 49 more photographs. When we dumped them into the computer that evening, a definite theme emerged.

(Hey! Where'd that one come from?! Simon...!)

Even the pictures that weren't of butts somehow seemed like butts:


Or related to butts one way or another:


They told us this pony had a mask on because he's extremely light-sensitive, but we suspect the real reason is that he'd had enough of the rear view:


Addendum by Josie:

The ponies were kind of creepiful, not just the one with the mesh mask over his whole head, but also the other ones. There was one who seemed very excited to see us, and he leaned his head over to us. So after a while we reached out cautionfully to pet his little nose, and he was like "WHGHGHGH!" and he pulled back his lips and opened his mouth and his teeth were at an obtuse angle to his jaw! So they were sticking out of his mouth! And they were yellow! And big! And ugly! I don't think he brushes his teeth.

Then we went to the next horse, because it seemed like that one was trying to bite us. But he came over to the next horse, and the two horses were looking at each other through the fence, and then they stuck their noses through the fence, and stuck out their big yellow teeth and tried to bite each other's noses off! But they never actually touched each other, because they would pull their heads back and stick them out again, and say "Don't you try and bite my nose off!" and then try again.