Like a true witch...

More randomness

One of my Washburn co-workers has a four-year-old daughter who likes to dress up like a pirate.  Score.

She came over in full regalia, and she and Coop vanquished dragons from the yard, had sword fights, and shared the parrot.

I'm guessing Halloween is one of Cooper's favorite holidays.  Not because he can dress up in costume; he does that all year long.  But because there are more props readily available.  His latest acquisition was a witch wig.

Turns out, he hates having hair in his eyes and mouth, so we made witch pigtails.  And fittingly, my witch wig has gray hair in it.


One recent Saturday, we headed out to the Baker wetlands for the monarch butterfly tagging event.

It turned out to be a chilly, rainy day, so all the monarchs were about 40 feet up in the air in the tops of the trees.  That made them a little hard to catch.

But Michael whacked one down with his net.  As it lay on the ground stunned, I swooped in to pick him up.

We were instructed to put a small sticker on the butterfly and to record the sticker number and the butterfly's gender.

After the obligatory photo op, we let him go and told him to "fly away to Mexico!"

Given the blow this one took from Michael's net, we're not entirely confident he'll make it to Mexico, but he's wearing a tag nonetheless!

Summer travel

Alan and I took a three-day trip to San Francisco this summer.  Without Cooper.  For the first time.  We had a great time.

For the first day and a half, this was the only photo we took:

These seven Victorian houses are known as the "painted ladies."  The middle one is the house where the Full House family (from the 80s sit-com) lived.

Then I felt bad that the only photo I had taken in SF was a pop culture reference from my childhood.  So we took some more:

A cable car:

Us:

The flag from the boat we took to Alcatraz:

Alcatraz island:

We had a great tour of the island and the prison.  Fantastic!


In other, less-fun travel, Cooper and I took a trip to Joplin, Missouri.  He had been pretty obsessed with talking about and reading about the tornado.  We had a couple of days off this summer, so we went down to Missouri to visit a high school friend of mine, and we detoured through Joplin.

The devastation is pretty astounding.

Fun new things

Alan went to Steamboat Springs for a family reunion, and he come home with bandanas.  Perfect for pirate head scarves.

Or to be cowbow bandits with the help of Fuzzy the Stick Horse.

Grandpa Cecil cleaned out his shed and sent this toolbox for Cooper. 

Grandpa Cecil's grandpa made it for him when he was a boy. Coop loved putting his little plastic tools in it. I'm guessing it'll get more use when his tools get bigger and sharper!

Grandma Carol found a new pirate hook, as well as a styrofoam parrot to complete Cooper's pirate outfit.

He was crazy-excited and didn't take off the hook, the bird, or the costume all weekend long.

Coop used a box of pencil erasers for witch fingernails.

Never a dull moment around here!