My sister and I have a tradition for Father's Day (or Boppa's Day, as we
call it, because we call our grandfather "Boppa") of making him a tee
shirt every year. The tradition started when Anya was in preschool and
her class decorated tee shirts by slathering a dead fish with paint and
laying a tee shirt on top to make a print. As we've gotten older, we've
continued the tradition by designing the tee with a theme from something
significant that happened that year. In past years, we've decorated the
tee with a cityscape of Jerusalem the year we visited Israel, bats and
balls to represent the fact that he came to all of our softball games
when Anya and I both played softball, our hand and footprints when we
were little, a Union Jack and cityscape of London the year we visited
the UK and, one of my all time favorites, when we printed a photo of
Anya and I on fabric "paper."
About a year ago, we found out that my
Boppa (who we had always thought was an only child) is actually one of
four brothers. The past year has been pretty unbelievable and we've
loved getting to know all our new relatives. Anyway, something else we
found out is that my great great grandparents were world famous animal
trainers and toured with their own circus act! So, for this year's tee
shirt theme, we chose this silhouette of my great great grandfather Max
Gruber standing atop his elephant, Eva. The picture was taken from a
real photo from The Queenslander newspaper from Australia, on 4 February
1905. As you can imagine, it's now one of our favorites and our Boppa
absolutely loves it (which is most important)!
