Back from vacation

Our family just spent a week at Minnesota's oldest state Park, Itasca, the home of the Mississippi Headwaters. It was loads of fun, and we had for the most part lovely weather. Both boys loved crossing the Headwaters:

If you compare these photos to the iconic photo on the cover of our tourbook, you'll see the water was pretty high.

We had near record breaking rains this June--we missed the record by about .3 inch! That of course means record mosquitoes too. Gah. Still, we managed to survive the bugs with the help of a can of bug spray a day. Poor Lola was popular with the bugs, but she grew to appreciate the screen tent.

Speaking of screen tent, here's something we found the last day:

The caterpillars we saw all week had started spinning cocoons. This one we found and removed from the screen tent before we left (we found two more on the rain fly when we got home). Don't you think this cocoon looks like Munch's The Scream?

As always, I am looking forward to scrapping the photos I took. I'll share my process for scrapping vacations later this week.

*I want to share one piece of sad news related to our vacation. We picked our cat up from the cat hotel when we got back, and she didn't look well (not the hotel's fault--she'd been slowing down for a while). As the day progressed, it became clear she was not going to make it--she couldn't walk, she wasn't drinking anything or sleeping, she was twitching. After spending the day cuddling her, we decided it was time to put her down. My sweet Agatha, whom we've owned since we were married, is gone. Though I'm sad, I'm glad she's not suffering.