Men!

All of Tigger's friends have grown up! They have left or are preparing to leave on their missions. Isn't that neat? Unfortunately that also means Tigger has grown up! Her friends rarely, if ever came to our house to hang out. Even when they were little--like her best buddies in the photo above. For some reason, one thought the Osmone was a police officer! But it wasn't the police her friends were wary of, it was me!

This is not a new concept in our home. I began scaring the boys when Cookie and Nanna were young adolescents. One day all the girls (I think we had six at the time) gathered at the large windows which looked out onto the park in the neighborhood where we lived. One sweltering summer day, a male youth in our ward was mowing the lawn and happened to be wearing satin basketball shorts. He was wearing his shoes as a safety precaution, but was bare from the waist up! The girls were all admiring him and his 'muscles' when I discovered them loitering at the windows. I likely yelled something totally stupid at him, but I know after that day, he always wore a shirt when mowing the lawn in the park.

When we moved to our own home, we basically brought the LDS Young Women Program into our new ward. It didn't take very long before all the male youth over the age of 10 started showing up at our yard (which was still a pile of dirt and rocks at that time). But the boys would show up in their baggie shorts with no shirts on! I'm not that dumb...even I recognized one of them was built well enough to take a second look! So I told the boys that I didn't mind them hangin' with my girls, but they HAD to have their shirts on! After that, you would see the boys pulling a t-shirt on as they came around the corner approaching our home. When they left, the t-shirts came off and were tucked again into their back pockets; flying behind them on their bikes as though they were some kind of super-man cape! Obviously it provided enough protection to withstand Mrs. Hill's evil glare! Just to make it painful--I added the requirement of picking up at least one rock each time they came. I now have a beautiful dry river bed as part of my landscaping thanks to all those boys who were brave enough to encounter ME.

But boys in shirts isn't what this post is really about. Go to the Panic Room for the full story!