Awkward Family Photos - Mike Bender [8]
The Carpenter and Horton Family
Arlington, Texas
Most of these are of my mom, brother, and me because my dad is taking the photo. He usually takes several billion per trip. Our family vacations are very rigorous; everything is planned to the last detail and it’s all sightseeing, which makes it very tiring for the rest of us. Not him. Even when we are about to collapse on a national monument or castle from the Middle Ages, he marches on.
Lia
Palo Alto, California
This family is just plain giddy about falling to their death.
Whatever you do, do not drop the dog. We repeat. Do not drop the dog.
When I was ten years old, my parents took us on vacation to a water park. I told my dad I had to go to the bathroom; he pointed to a building and let me go in by myself. When I got in, I noticed there were no urinals, and none of the stalls had toilets in them. Confused, I went into a stall anyway, pulled the curtain closed behind me, and did my business all over the floor. When I got out, we started walking away when another man with his son asked my dad if we knew of any bathrooms nearby. My dad pointed to the building that I had just exited. The man said, “No, that’s just a dressing room to change in and out of bathing suits.” My dad said that was not true, as I had just used the bathroom in there. The other man insisted and my father started to get angry: “Are you calling my son a liar?” My dad told the man we would all go in together to prove my innocence. Despite my objections, the four of us went in, and when my dad whipped open the curtain to the first stall …
Kevin
North Smithfield, Rhode Island
When I was a teenager, my family went to Philadelphia to tour the sights. My dad decided to wear bright yellow pants with a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt that day, so he looked like a total tourist. I was already embarrassed by what he was wearing, but then he ramped it up a notch. After listening to a tour guide explain the history of the Liberty Bell, my father raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, miss, your bell has a crack in it.”
Crickets.
Suzy
Lexington, Kentucky
My family took a two-week camping trip to the Grand Canyon when I was ten. After packing up the wood-grain station wagon, my parents, older sister, the family dog, and myself climbed into the car. As my dad was backing out of the camping site, he backed into a ditch where big clumps of grass became stuck in the bumper. When we hit the border of Arizona, the toll guy asked us if we were transporting any fruit over the border, and my dad replied, “No, but we have a little grass in the back.”
Teri
Westbrook, Maine
On a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, my two brothers and I slept on three small fold-out cots wedged side by side in the middle of our hotel room. I was nine, my brother David was seven, and my youngest brother, Andy, was four. One morning, David awoke to find his sheets soaked in urine. Embarrassed that he’d wet his bed, he sheepishly woke our parents in the next room. Our mom proceeded to clean him up, only to discover that although his pj’s were damp (and his sheets soaked), his underwear was mysteriously dry. This was impossible, of course, and so we racked our brains, trying to make sense of this anomaly … when we noticed Andy sitting Indian-style on his dry cot, grinning, a damp patch at the front of his pajamas. It didn’t take an Encyclopedia Brown to piece it together. In the middle of the night, Andy had rolled onto David’s cot, peed with abandon, then rolled back onto his own cot for a dry night’s sleep.
Mark
Mount Kisco, New York
e wait an entire year for the one day that is all about us. Our parents can’t get angry with us and our siblings