Alice Bee looks grumpy.

The 5-year-old is sitting at the head of the dinner table on the covered porch of her Takoma Park, Maryland home. She’s smooshing her face into her hands. Her blond pigtails drape over her flowered shirt, while her blue eyes stare straight ahead.
“Oh, I like that,” says her father, Dave Engledow. He’s sitting behind a camera hooked to a laptop. “Look up here.”
Dave tries to appear cool but looks tense. This is one of many shoots for the 45-year-old photographer-writer’s debut children’s book, “The Little Girl Who Didn’t Want to Go to Bed.” To the millions of people who have liked and shared his images online, Dave is already known as the World’s Best Father. His hyper-exaggerated, highly humorous photos of Alice Bee as a mischief-maker extraordinaire and him as a distracted dad went viral in 2012, landing them on the “Today” show and earning them enduring Internet fame.
The book he’s working on is based on stories he used to tell Alice Bee (Bee is her middle name, but everyone calls her Alice Bee) when she was struggling to fall asleep. “She knows the Little Girl is her even though I’m not specifically saying it’s Alice,” he says. “That way the character can get into more trouble.”
The story’s hero/antihero would rather do anything else than go to bed – even clean the toilet – because she’s convinced that her parents are living large without her.
The dinner-table photo is set at the end of the day. As the parents, played by Dave and his wife, Jen, are talking animatedly about what happened, the Little Girl realizes she can’t remember any of it because she fell asleep.
The book is the first of a trilogy to be published by HarperCollins in late 2017. In May 2015, Dave quit his full-time job as deputy director of a nonprofit organization to make his February 2016 deadline. But he still has to work around Alice Bee’s school schedule, play dates, family time and those instances when she’s just not in the mood.
“I worry about the shoots where she is not into it or is bored and wants to do something else,” he says. “When she looks back at this and these images, I want her to have nice memories of this thing she and Daddy did together. I don’t want her to look back at it negatively.”
The World’s Best Father images (doctored, of course) include her as a toddler, hoisting a turkey twice the size of her head over a deep fryer; holding up her parents on the palms of her hands; and getting washed as a baby by her dad in an open washing machine. The real-life Alice Bee has her own real-life tricks that would make for good photos, if they weren’t so destructive. Not long ago, her dad recounted on Facebook, the kindergartener tossed her mother’s toothbrush in the trash. Her excuse: “Because I used it two weeks ago to clean the sink.”
Dave’s photos are a lot more work than the iPhone pics most parents take of their little ones. Like his previously published photos, each of the roughly 40 images in the book is a composite of two to six photographs. Editing those files together and adding hyper-realistic, ultra-vivid coloring so they pop off the page takes anywhere from five to 15 hours per image.
playing a character
Alice Bee has been a star since before she could walk. In early 2011, just nine weeks after her birth, Dave took a photo of her that eventually went viral.
In it, he’s standing in his kitchen holding her under his arm like a football. Wearing a “Schoolhouse Rock!” T-shirt and a bleary thousand-yard stare, he uses Alice’s bottle to add milk to his coffee in a mug that reads, “World’s Best Father.”
“I wanted to make fun of myself,” says Dave, who studied photojournalism in college, “because I was exhausted and felt really clueless as a new father.”
In June 2012, Jen, an Army chemical officer, was posted to Korea for a year. To keep her connected with the growth of Alice, who was then a year old, Dave produced a World’s Best Father picture nearly every week, each more outrageous and hilarious than the last: Dave distractedly pouring lighter fluid on a blazing barbecue as Alice Bee flambés marshmallows; Dave carving a pumpkin with her sitting inside it, playing with a lit candle.
The photos “evolved into me playing this character,” he says. “It’s a cautionary tale. Don’t be the guy in the photo.”
In September 2012, Dave launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1,200 to print calendars. The site’s editors named it a staff pick, leading to stories on BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post and TV appearances.
In a day, Dave’s World’s Best Father Facebook page went from 1,000 likes to 12,000. (As of June, it had 200,000-plus.) He scored a book deal, and in spring 2014, Gotham published “Confessions of the World’s Best Father.”
Dave’s agent, Steve Ross, spent time mulling the potential of Dave’s work. His “aha” moment came at a dinner over a year ago, where some children were entranced by “Confessions of the World’s Best Father.”
“One of them would turn the page, and another one would say, ‘Don’t turn it yet. I want to see it some more,’ “ he says. “That’s when I realized the natural, organic market for Dave’s work is kids, not adults. I think they’re attracted to the subversive quality.”
Dave Linker, executive editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, agreed and signed Dave to write and shoot the trilogy he is now working on.
Doubts about quitting the nonprofit group plagued him for a while, until he took Alice Bee to get last-minute flowers for teacher appreciation day. Instead of picking out flowers as she was supposed to, she insisted on grabbing five little Mylar balloons on a stick. “I felt my blood pressure rising as it has done in this sort of situation for the past three years when her shenanigans have caused me to worry about being late for my job,” he wrote on Tumblr. Then he looked down and saw that all the balloons read, “It’s a boy!” Instead of losing it, he laughed.
“Even if there’s nothing else after these books, I get this gift,” he wrote, “a year or more of being able to find special moments like this.”

Cooking popsicles
“What do you like to cook?” I ask Alice Bee, who’s standing on a small, red footstool. It’s scooted up to the kitchen counter so she can mash sausage for the rigatoni Pugliese she’s helping her father make. A white apron covers her pink shirt and jean shorts.
“Popsicles,” she replies gleefully.
Dave is standing next to her, trying to keep his eyes on her and three occupied burners.
As she helps de-seed a pomegranate for a salad, Alice Bee announces she recently flooded the bathroom. “I left the water running in the sink,” she explains.
Jen stands off to the side, making sure the crazy train stays on the tracks. Sometimes she steps in to hit the brakes, like the time Dave wanted to do a photo of him reading the newspaper while he distractedly lit a cigarette for Alice Bee.
Another time, Jen recalls, “we were very informally approached about doing reality television, and we very quickly said ‘no.’ Alice Bee will never be Honey Boo Boo.”
Alice Bee wasn’t told of her close call with reality TV stardom. And even though her image has been published around the world and shared millions of times online, she’s only partially divined the uniqueness of her situation. “She’s aware of it, but she’s not aware that not every kid can see a picture of themselves in GQ or People,” Dave says. “We were talking about going to New York City, and she said, ‘Can we go back on the ‘Today’ show?”
Alice Bee has moved on to removing membranes from blood orange slices. Her father leaves her to it, while he cooks pasta. A few minutes later, her mother checks her progress.
“Wait, where did all the oranges go?” she asks, peering into the bowl.
“Did you eat them all?” her father asks.
“No,” Alice Bee says in a low, guttural voice favored by cartoon villains. Then she slowly pirouettes to reveal her face streaked with red juice, which is running down the front of her apron, and bursts into laughter.
“It’s this combination of that personality and constantly amazing us,” Dave says of his daughter later. “We’re under her spell. I said to Jen the other day that as soon as Alice figures out that a smile is a way to get whatever she wants, we’re doomed.”