For those of you having a little trouble discerning just what this is, it is my six-year-old nephew’s rendition of his father at work. Matt, also a veterinarian and he of the “if the horse trailer is plugged in he must be home” fame,  is checking a horse with colic. “This is you, Dad, and you can tell because you’ve got fur on your face!” (For the record, Matt and his beard are on the left side of this picture, and that is Matt’s arm entering the horse’s rump.) And if your son sees you in this position enough to know that this is your job, then you must go through an awful lot of shoulder-length plastic gloves.

This drawing makes me laugh incredibly hard, if only because of the realism and humor and sheer audacity of being six. And besides, what good is having a blog if you can’t use it to poke fun at your brother every once in a while?

Father’s Day is a good time to reflect and think on some of the things that we have learned from our dads. Here is a short list of my own.

• Manual Labor is not the president of Mexico. However, once upon a time, he did reside at Bridger Vet, and he is not gender specific. Shovel work in August isn’t just for boys, and every man can and should be able to do laundry.
• Always carry Wet Ones(tm) in your truck, even if you don’t have kids.
• “No!” is a perfectly fine place from which to begin negotiations.
• Duct tape can fix anything.
• Always carry a watch and a pocketknife. (This has fallen to the wayside a bit, due to mobile phones and the TSA.)
• My brother walks like my father, and when he isn’t pretending to be Darth Vader, my nephew walks like my brother. The poor child is doomed.

So happy Father’s Day to my own father, who’s probably thrilled that I lack an artistic side, to Matt, to my husband (although we just have Eleanor and Beatrice, our four-legged children with speech impediments, no actual children), and to everyone who parents two-legged and four-legged children alike.  You’ve undoubtedly earned your stripes!