"That's a note to Dad. That's me and Dad eating cupcakes. There's one more for Dad and I'm on my last one. Dad came in after I finished eating one."

Translation of lettering on the picture: "This is an Army airplane"

"The people in the window are armies and the one by the door is a pilot."

"Kids hiding under the table and that one (pointing at the second from the left) is whose birthday it is."

Translation of pencil writing on picture, once it's reorganized so the words are in the order the artist intended: "Buy this for me. Marianne. Buy this for all the little kids even me."

In other words, she wants roller skates just like these for her birthday. And when they saw the picture, so did Elizabeth and Ruth.

"A flying cat and a flower garden."

On the small blue lines over the fence: "That means there's a cat deep in the garden you can't really see."

"Dandy's wings fell off. The people from that boat slipped into the sea. And that's a Notre Dame flag and the sea."

l to r: "That's me, Rosie the spider from the basement, Dad, Ruth, Jake and you (Staci)."
Heads were intentionally omitted by the artist when the subjects were too tall for the page.

"That's me in the water and ocean waves. Those are my water shoes and I have some new ocean-proof pants and the thing on my head is my ocean hat. It's morning so the moon is setting but the sun is forgetting to come up."

"A shark is diving for a dolphin that just went under the sea."

"Jesus on the cross."

editor's note: We use a lot of scratch paper...

"That's just the farm."
This was drawn from looking at at a toy barn, at the request of one of Nathaniel's colleagues at a family picnic. She copied it right down to the "Shelcore Chunky Farm" label on the front of the barn.

"Oh right! 'Tornado Time'. So, there's a tornado in front of the clouds. There's your (Staci's) head in the basement down there. There are 6 tornados behind the clouds you can't see. Those are bricks."