How to attract attention and solicit unwanted comments

Just walk around in a crowded area with four kids aged five and under and see what happens. Make sure one is an infant to maximize impact.

Yesterday a friend of mine, let's call her Rebecca because that's her name, and I and our various offspring headed downtown to get out of the house and see what we could see. I saw one of my co-workers who did a double and triple take. But it more more interesting to see how total strangers reacted to the group.

We deprived the two year old of his nap which was very bad judgement on our part but he was doing so well, until he wasn't. He had an impressive temper tantrum complete with full body resistance right in the middle of the very crowded Church Street. I was holding him and trying to get him into the stroller and people were watching and I bet more than one of them thought I was trying to kidnap him. It certainly looked that way from the way he was thrashing and fighting.

An old man that seemed to firing on fewer than all cylinders very urgently told me that the Crocs Sam was wearing climbing on the big rocks were not safe. Yes, thank you, I know that. And for the record the only reason he was wearing them is because he insists on wearing all his other shoes in various sources of water leaving them soggy and nasty so it was his damn Crocs or blister inducing wet shoes.

As the kids were climbing on the sculptures and steps in front of city hall we received a history lesson from another older gentleman on how they'd been fountains and now they aren't and isn't that great because the fountains were so bad for the kids because they could drown. He finished with a sweeping glance of all four kids and a "God bless you!" which left me wondering what he'd left unsaid because he seemed to be biting his tongue.

We stopped in to get some hot chocolate for the kids and shortly after we got there another group of mothers with babies showed up. That group seemed to be limiting it to one child per adult but it still started the people who where there talking about babies taking over the world. Or perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.

I realized after yesterday that when you're with one child, you're very nearly invisible to the masses as I rarely get much reaction when I'm out and about with Sam. But upping the kid ratio considerably puts you on the radar.

When I downloaded the pictures from yesterday I came across a couple of pictures of local artwork I've taken recently. Do you like the mummified statues? They aren't normally mummified although I don't know if under the shrink wrap they're the real statues or replicas. The original statues used to be located near a museum but they were in such bad shape they were taken down. They, or the replicas covered in shrink wrap appeared in the original location. There was an article in the paper about them and how the statues are being restored. But a couple of days later the statues appeared on Church Street with no explanation and that's where I took this picture.

This is a sculpture by a local artist named Lars-Erik Fisk and it's located down near General Dynamics. He does all sorts of different sculptures of various buildings and vehicles formed into sphere and they're amazing. I want one for my backyard but suspect they're somewhat out of my price range.