Washington Trip

Last week we flew up to Washington state for Conrad's grandmother's funeral, and stayed a while to see some of his family and hang out in the rain. So here are about a million pictures...

The leaves, the glorious leaves. If I only had a nickel for the number of times Conrad rolled his eyes at Amelia and me as we collected our souvenirs. No cheesy over-priced gift shops for us. Not that we don't do plenty of autumn leaf collecting here in Colorado, but there were these ginormous ones (like the one Amelia has in the pictures above) that you don't see here. Or at least I don't, but then maybe I just don't get out much. And maybe it was just the rain that made the colors more vibrant, but everything just looked so different! So plenty of nature was collected including an assortment of leaves, nuts and seed pods, and pebbles from the shore of Puget Sound, which I could not bring myself to stop picking up. It was a problem. Yes, we brought leaves, sticks, and rocks back on the plane. In our checked bag- not taking any chances. Although is anybody nerdy enough to listen to Bob Edwards Weekend on NPR every week like I am? This morning I just heard him interview Jeffrey Goldberg about his experimentation with getting away with crazy stuff in his carry-on.... I digress. My point is that Washington is so beautiful that we simply had to bring little pieces of it back with us.

When in Washington state one must always be prepared... with one's very own frog umbrella of course.

And here are some of the pictures Conrad's aunt took, she has a super-cool camera which I totally covet. Also she has some pretty cool photography skills, which I suppose are handy to make owning that super-cool camera worthwhile.

Milo was allowed to watch (a really big screen-yikes!) tv while at my in-laws. For a few minutes. Until he got "hungry" and had to be taken into the kitchen for a snack. It was some animal nature show so Mama wasn't freaking out too terribly bad. Killing all his precious little baby brain cells or something, I'm telling you. He liked it:

Kisses from Crash, the sweetest yellow lab:

What we have here is a nice close-up shot of Amelia's self-inflicted mullet. I evened out the front so she now has really cute bangs, but also some pretty short stuff on the sides that will need some time to grow out.

And yet she's still so beautiful...
Halloween happened while we were in Washington. Since November 1st, 2007, Amelia had decided she wanted to be a ghost for the next Halloween. I was thrilled... a good old-fashioned sheet-with-eye-holes costume. Then about a couple months ago she started changing her mind, much to my disappointment, even though I really did expect it. She wanted to be a witch at one point, which was fine, then went back to the ghost idea with added cowboy hat and boots, then of course came the "actually Mom, I want to be a princess again." There it was. *sigh* And the impromptu trip to Washington made it hard to fit in the sewing of a "Dopey" costume for Milo in order to have a whole Sleeping Beauty theme. Someone found him a monkey costume. At least there was the last-minute crown, there had to be something homemade. Both kids had loads of fun, which is what matters when it all comes down to it of course.

Is it? Could it be? A picture of all four of us? It is! Holy cow.