The Pip has occasionally gotten kind of short shrift, blog-wise, compared to his sister. SteelyKid, being the oldest, had a few years of exclusivity before The Pip came along, and I’ve gotten busier over that time and don’t have the free time to do quite as much posting of cute-kid material as I used to. I have to make an exception, though, for the book that he wrote and illustrated this week. He decided that this was a thing he wanted to do just before bedtime one evening, and took a stack of paper, a crayon, and a pen, and set down the story of Panther Man and the Black Tiger. The only adult contributions to this project were answering a couple of questions about the spelling of words, and stapling the ends result together.

So, without further ado, I give you Panther Man and the Black Tiger (image captions are cleaned-up versions of the text written by The Pip):

I think that is totally awesome, especially for a first-grader who’s way on the young end of his class.

And, of course, any good book needs an author photo, so here’s The Pip this morning, after a bracing game of “avalanche,” which means he stands under a snow-laden tree while I shake it, so all the snow falls down on his head: