My daughter Valentine is a very adventurous little baby bear.

Maybe a little TOO adventurous. Get down from that tree!

Valentine keeps smuggling into packages and suitcases and traveling around the world. She has been to Wales, the Grand Canyon, Florida, and even North Korea.  (Or was it the North Pole? I’m not sure.)  And everywhere she goes, she gets into trouble.

But a couple weeks ago, little Valentine had her most dangerous adventure yet! Watch out for the giant shark!!!  (Don’t they have lifeguards at this beach?)

Fortunately, some space aliens happened to be wandering by…

They whisked little Valentine away in their giant water powered spaceship…..promising they would repair her leg and return her to us in a couple weeks.

(That’s what her brothers told me, anyway.)

A few years ago, I started liberating some of my Dinsdale cousins on Ebay.   Big mistake.

The Dinsdales all have big appetites and very little common sense.  Unlike ME, of course.

These are my wild bear cousins, Doug and Claire Dinsdale.  They don’t speak English, they don’t wear clothes, they have terrible table manners, and you would NOT believe what they do in public, right in front of the baby bears.

This is my big Brother Oliver. All he talks about is food and hot pink lady bears. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…) He also is way too friendly with dragons, if you ask me.

Cousin Hershey is best friends with Brother Oliver. Hershey will eat anything, even a potted plant! He also is convinced that he is actually a mole.

Finally,  here I am with Cousin Danny Dinsdale.  I found Cousin Danny living in an interfaith center outside Chicago. He is obsessed with fruits and vegetables and yoga and peace and love and brotherhood between humans and fluffies and saving the polar bears and the turtles and the frogs.  And he can’t keep a secret, either. 

As some of you have heard, my lovely wife Ursula traveled to South Carolina a few months ago for an extreme makeover. She was in the capable paws of Jools’ Tribe o’Fluffies, who did a great job.  She looks at least twenty years younger now!

This is what Ursula looked like before the makeover:

And this is what she looks like today! She can hold her head up high for the first time ever! Doesn’t she look lovely?

And THIS is what it looks like when……oh, never mind.