"Boppas" Day Present

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)!