Travels with my Family Read Online Free PDF

all stopped and stared. My mother was standing in the middle of the pen, surrounded by sheep. She was holding her drawing pad up in the air.
    â€œShe’s drawing sheep, I guess.”
    My mother draws all the time. She’ll draw anything, even smelly, wooly sheep.
    My mother pushed the sheep away, walked to the other end of the meadow and started drawing. The sheep followed her, baa-ing loudly. They were playing the opposite game from Jackson the horse. Every time my mother moved away to get the right perspective to draw them, the sheep crowded closer to her. Maybe they wanted to learn how to be artists.
    They were watching her from very close up, as if they needed glasses. One of them put his nose right on her drawing pad, as if he wanted to help out.
    â€œThat’s Velcro for you! He wants to be part of everything,” George snorted. “We call him that because he sticks to you like a burr on a dog. Come on, boys, let’s save your mother from being trampled to death!”
    George opened the gate, and we went into the sheep pen with Jackson.
    â€œGive the lady some room, you incorrigible lot of fleabags!” George told them. And he gave them a few taps on their wooly rear ends.
    â€œThanks, George,” my mother said. I looked at her pad. She hadn’t gotten very far, and there was sheep drool on the paper. “You should really brush their teeth once in a while. Whew!”
    George laughed and patted Velcro. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’m sure Velcro would love having his teeth brushed.”
    My mother sat down to draw again. We were enjoying the peace and quiet when, thirty seconds later, I heard my little brother cry for help.

    How did he do it? I’ll never know. But he managed to get his head stuck in the fence. And you know by now how curious sheep are, and how when one sheep does something, they all want to do it. Velcro came over to see what the problem was, followed by Einstein, Cleopatra, Sneaker and Rocky 4, and pretty soon my brother had a couple dozen sheep around him, all trying to figure out what this new animal was doing in their meadow, and did he want to eat their grass, and was it really greener on the other side of the fence?
    Velcro started to lick my brother’s left ear.
    â€œ
Help!
”
    â€œDon’t panic there, lad. You’re getting your ears cleaned for free.”
    George was as strong as a farmer is supposed to be. Still, I helped him lift the top log of the wood fence, and my little brother squirmed free.
    â€œI hate sheep!”
    â€œThey were just being friendly,” my mother said.
    But I wasn’t so sure. My friends don’t lick my ears.
    Just then my father showed up. He had been upstairs in the house, in George’s office, checking his e-mail messages. He looked at us standing around my brother, who still had tears in his eyes. Jackson the horse was munching on George’s straw hat. The sheep had surrounded us again, and were baa-ing as loudly as ever. The peacocks screeched from their perch on the fence.
    Just then, Tuco started imitating a phone ringing.
    â€œDid I miss anything?” my father asked.
    â€œNot really,” I said. “But maybe you should go answer the phone.”
    â€œOkay,” he agreed, and ran back into the house.
    I think even the sheep were laughing.

FIVE
Our parents nearly abandon us on a
beach in California, where my brother is nearly
swept out to sea by a sneaker wave

    There’s one good thing about having strange parents like mine. You get to travel a lot. You never have any trouble writing the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay that you have to write every September in school. Sometimes the teachers tell me I must be making this stuff up, and I can’t really blame them.
    My mother was still laughing at my father over the trick Tuco played on him when we reached California, a few days after we left George’s farm. The