If you were an especially astute observer, prone to critical analysis and questioning the status quo, you might carefully reexamine the pictures and wonder:
- Knowing of David's obsession with anything on wheels (and knowing that Mary's interests are more or less limited to her pacifer and her toes), why are there more pictures of Mary than David? Wouldn't David's parents know that it would be more important to take pictures of David? And more specifically, when it comes to the Holy Grail of vehicles (the firetruck), why is it Mary, and not David, posed on its bumper?
- Why would Mary's mom allow all these pictures of Mary to be taken without stopping to fix that darn piece of hair hanging in her face?
After some scrutiny and reevaluation, you might draw the following conclusions:
You might speculate that David was actually scared most of the time and refused to come close enough to the trucks to have his picture taken. In an effort to convince David that it was safe and fun to touch the trucks, his parents hurriedly posed Mary on a number of them. That would explain the bad hair--the pictures weren't about Mary, they were really just an effort to get more pictures of David. You might then dismiss the two cute pictures of David as the result of good luck in one case and the overwhelming allure of a Bobcat in the other. You could substantiate your claim by pointing to the weekend before, when David was traumatized by a loud security alarm (and truck horns are loud too). You could point to historical trends in this family--just a generation earlier, David's grandparents traumatized his uncle Daniel by taking him on Star Tours when he was only two. Daniel remained scared of everything for years afterwards. Traumatize a two-year-old once, and everything suddenly becomes traumatizing.
But that would all be mere speculation. I'm sticking to the official version.
