Madama Butterfly

This year, I picked out a costume for Her Royal Highness (HRH) Berkeley. One that she could wear and that we all could coordinate with. She was Madama Butterfly and we were butterflies in waiting and our friend Karene, the chemistry teacher, was a crazy entomologist following us around with a magnifying glass! 8-)

Here is HRH's outfit. Pink and purple wings with a headband antennae (our wings coordinated, of course!).

HRH was pretty good about letting us put the outfit on her. The hard part was figuring out how the outfit went on. Here we obviously have it wrong. The front part goes in front of her front legs!



Then we had to figure out the back ties. They were made for a much bigger lab. We think HRH might be a pygmy lab. She is the runt of the litter and is only 42 pounds at 6 months.

I finally gave up and just tied the back in a bow. It worked.

She gave me a big lick in the face when we were all done with the wings. But there was one more part of the costume to go: the headband!

Would you believe she wore it for the Entire Day! Never once tried to take it off. I think she thought it was a crown or a tiara. 8-)


Here she is watching the little lower division kids parade by with their costumes. Their reactions were awesome. Every time they caught sight of her, they would say, "Look at BERKELEY!" And they pointed and smiled and laughed. It was SOOOOO worth it. All the middle division kids loved it, the upper division kids loved it and the faculty loved it. She made EVERYONE'S day. She was a happiness generator on Wednesday. It was so cool.

After the parade, I put her coat on and then put the wings on over her coat. She still looked cute.

And they didn't impede her napping.

Truly, she was a Monarch Butterfly!


Here we all are with Her Royal Highness.

Halloween Parade Bingo

Our school mascot is the Buccaneer, so I had to buy the pirate hat for the halloween parade on Wednesday. Of course he didn't want to wear it. The photo above is a special pet setting that is super quick so that when the hat actually settles on his head for that one microsecond before he whips his head in a manic shake to bite the offensive hat off, the shutter clicks off and you get a chillingly accurate portrait of puppy disgust. Before I discovered this setting, the closest we could get the hat to his head is in the photo below:

On another note, I witnessed something very cute the other day. I stepped out of my office to speak with my library assistant and left Bingo alone in coat. A student came in for an appointment with me. When I returned I found them both sitting on the floor staring at each other. They were about a foot apart. Olivia turned to me and said, "It's so cool. It's like he knows he can't touch me because he has his coat on."