McKay has been coming home with all sorts of rhymes and songs from his preschool. This one is our favorite but there are other cute ones too. (If you'd like to see the others, I could post them too.) We tried to tell him the word is "too" but he insists he's right :)Closed captioning: I'm a mean old witch with a hat and I fly on my broom with my cat. My nose is pointed and my chin is too(t). You better watch out or I'll scare you. Boo!
Carter wanted in on the action too.
Closed captioning: (Carter) Um... uh.. "Wearing Halloween clothes!" (Gabe) Did you just make that song up? (Carter) Yes. "There's a moon up the sky..." (Gabe) Did you just make that song up too? (Carter) It's the same.
Remember 'Where's Waldo?'? It seems like that guy was always lost in some wacky place with way too many people wearing red and white, like the picture below. Somebody mentioned him about a month ago while I was trying to decide what to wear for Halloween...
An image popped into my head.. "That's it!" I thought. "It would be so easy! And everyone would know who I am, not like when I was Professor Quirrell and my customers thought I was Johnny Carson doing Carnac the Magnificent... All I need are shoes (check!), blue jeans (check!), and a red and white striped shirt and beanie and some round glasses."
It turned out to be more involved than I expected. For starters, no stores sell any clothes that Waldo might wear except the pants and shoes. No red and white beanies, no red and white striped shirts. You can't even buy round glasses anymore. We had to make everything from scratch. The shirts we made with red duct tape over long-sleeve white shirts, and found that duct tape doesn't stretch enough and had to be retaped on the person's body once the shirt was on. The glasses I bent out of pipe cleaners. The hats... um, I had to turn in my HeMan Club card and learn to knit. Suzanne and I knitted hats for something like a week while we watched TV at night. But the results are, well, see for yourself.
After we made the costumes, Carter said he didn't want to be Waldo for Halloween. It was too late to do anything else, so he was Waldo anyway. But any comment like "Oh, you're such a cute Waldo" was answered with "I'm not Waldo!" Next year we'll make sure he gets to choose his own costume."Carter, smile for the camera."
"No."
P.S. - the glasses didn't last long.I wore my costume to work and got complimented on literally every single thing I wore. "I love your outfit!" "Did you make that hat? It's amazing!" "That shirt, why didn't I think of that! It's so cute!" "How did you make those glasses? You must be really talented." I even got complimented on my jeans (which was a little weird) and to complete the package I asked a coworker if she liked my shoes, and she said yes. Not one customer yelled at me all day - I might dress up more often. You might wonder why I made fake glasses when I wear real glasses. I'm near-sighted, so my glasses don't help within about 6 feet, so it's a pain to wear them and stare at my computer screen all day. Don't the boys look cute?
Trick-or-treating! We went to a really busy neighborhood and we probably got over a hundred comments. "Look, it's a Waldo family!" "Where's Waldo? There he is!" "Look, matching Waldo costumes! That's so awesome!" I felt like a celebrity. There was one group of annoying teenagers who "found" us four or five times and I had to tell them to check out the book - Waldo-finding fun on every page. Other than that, we had a BLAST.
In case you looked but couldn't find him, Waldo is slightly to the left of the center of the left upper quadrant, behind the shoe sales table.
Trick-or-treating! We went to a really busy neighborhood and we probably got over a hundred comments. "Look, it's a Waldo family!" "Where's Waldo? There he is!" "Look, matching Waldo costumes! That's so awesome!" I felt like a celebrity. There was one group of annoying teenagers who "found" us four or five times and I had to tell them to check out the book - Waldo-finding fun on every page. Other than that, we had a BLAST.In case you looked but couldn't find him, Waldo is slightly to the left of the center of the left upper quadrant, behind the shoe sales table.
Carter is getting so big! Here he is on school picture day - the part in his hair didn't even last out the front door.
...and some playing in the front yard with McKay in the sprinklers.
Then we went to Costco. McKay LOVES Costco. We didn't even have to feed him lunch when we got back to the house. Here he has a sample in one hand while he's asking for another.
Mostly thanks to the example of fellow bloggers 
I finished in 17:15, which would have made me ashamed in high school, but was 12 minutes, 45 seconds faster than what I told Suzanne my time would be. It was a good experience. If I didn't have to pay an entry fee, I'd run in a lot more of these.
Sherene (Suzanne's sister) came for a visit and introduced us to a new addiction: Catan! We can't stop playing and we've bought almost all the expansion packs for it - basic game of Settlers of Catan + Seafarers of Catan pictured here after an AWESOME game... which I won.
Our good friend Rachel took us to her favorite blackberry/blueberry picking spot one day. We left the boys with her husband Russ and brought all the buckets we could find, thus the Trick-or-Treat pumpkin. We brought home enough berries to make us sick of berries for a couple of months. We made enough jam to fill the rest of the freezer but still had berries on cereal, ice cream and by the handful for snacks for a week and a half. Just one more benefit of living on the Oregon Coast - Berry Country, Yum!
To appease the Spirits of the Berry Bushes, Suzanne gave them a blood sacrifice - MY blood, to be specific. I got her the biggest berries though, usually with a smarmy comment like, "For you, my love - the biggest, juiciest berry on the bush!" 
For "Before & After" effect: The old, condemned, rotten deck....
The old, chipping paint job...
...our new, sleek, modern look! Tah-dah!
The inside of said yurt. Like I said, this is not camping.
The next several pictures are of the boys on the playground in the campsite. When I think of camping as a boy, we played with sticks and rocks and leaves, and we liked it!
Carter pretended not to notice me there with the camera, then... "Roar!"
Can you believe this is in a campground?
Sitting around the campfire after a dinner of hot dogs, chips, and grapes and still happy we're camping (except there was no barrier between our camp and the next. See the lady at her campfire behind Suzanne? There ought to be some bushes or something.)
The next morning and no longer happy campers. We didn't sleep very well. The boys woke up several times, the baby next door woke up several times, the bathrooms were 30 yards away and had to be visited at midnight, the sun shone through the yurt's skylight earlier than Suzanne would have liked, and I accidentally set off the car alarm at 6:30.
The boys went back inside the yurt after breakfast because they were cold, and there's a heater inside the yurt. A heater.
Since we were "camping" at Beverly Beach State Park (less than 5 miles from home) we had to go to the beach. But it was cold and foggy and the boys just wanted to hide inside my jacket. Since I was the only one who appeared to want to stay out, I gave in and we all went home for baths and naps.
The boys swinging on the swingset that I couldn't have put together without help from Russ. And in answer to your question, it IS level. It's the yard that's not.
It has 164 stairs and the view from the top is amazing! You can see for miles in all directions.
Grandpa and Grandma Carter and McKay and Carter at the top of the Astoria Column. The boys always look like that on sunny days.
There's a gift shop at the bottom of the column that sells balsa wood gliders for 75 cents each. We bought one for each of us. You throw it from the top, then someone at the bottom picks it up and claims it as their own. One old lady was yelling at some boys at the bottom, "That's my airplane! Don't touch it! I saw that!" If you try, your glider can stay aloft for 10 seconds or more. The boys tried to throw their gliders straight down. Here's McKay watching his nose-dive into the side of the Column.
We got off the trolley at the Maritime Museum, but we didn't go in. On our last trip to Astoria we had trouble controlling Carter and McKay inside the museum. We wanted to look and read and they wanted to run and climb. This trip we decided to skip the aggravation. Instead we hung out in the courtyard for 20 minutes. There was a huge bell that the boys got to ring - it was so loud it made my teeth hurt. They should put a warning on that thing. Around the flagpole there was a giant compass rose, but any circles on the ground are just race tracks to Carter and McKay.
McKay sitting on another giant anchor. It looks just like the one in Florence, only bigger. He wanted me to pick the anchor up with him on it. He laughed when I couldn't, so I told him it was because he was sitting on it. If he hadn't been sitting on it, I could have done it easy. Right.
The wreck of the Peter Iredale, which shipwrecked in 1906 on the beach outside of Warrenton (east across the bay from Astoria). The sailors were unharmed and were pickep up by a rescue ship. They later found they could have walked to shore. The wreckage was an instant tourist attraction, still is after 103 years, and will be until it rusts away completely.
Here's the newest money-wasting extreme sport I'd like to try: Kite-surfing. You should have seen these guys - there must have been 20 or more kite surfers. That beach is great for it because it's 10 miles long with steady wind from the North. They were going so fast they could have been water-skiing. Every so often they'd jump a wave and just keep going up - 10, 15, 20 feet into the air sometimes! Watch some 
On the way there we made a stop and the boys requested a rerun: the Tillamook Cheese Factory. So on the way back we stopped there again. I know it doesn't sound fun, but the place has lines like Disneyland.
On the upper floor they have an observation deck where you can watch the cheese being cut from 40 lb blocks to manageable sizes, then shrink-wrapped and sent to shipping (I guess). The boys would have stayed there all day.
It really was interesting - you wouldn't expect to see robots and conveyor belts in a cheese factory, but that's how they get the job done.
While the boys watched that, I stood in this line for ice cream. This is the shortest line in the factory to buy ice cream. The others are downstairs and are a lot longer.
The ice cream there is wonderful - they have 38 flavors, but we only tried a few: orange sherbet, lemon blueberry pie, blueberry cheesecake, Sweet Centennial, Tillamook mudslide, Udderly chocolate, and white licorice. Yum. I think it's the reason the boys wanted a second visit.
Carter enjoyed the road trip...
... and McKay enjoyed the road trip. We all had fun, but we already miss Grandma and Grandpa Carter.
On a completely unrelated note, our deck is finally going back up. Our friend Stu is helping us build it, and it's a good thing because I don't know anything.
