My dad has a wicked sense of humor. He always has – he is legendary amongst the family. And my mom swears up and down that one day, she will, in fact, get him back. So anytime we can hatch up some kind of crazy plan to get him, we do.

Back in October, when we went to Lauren’s wedding in Dallas, we were perusing the Pottery Barn and we cracked up over their Halloween decorations. There was this big black crow, and Dad held it up and I took his picture with it. “Look real scared,” I said. We all laughed.  I think it goes back to our shared love of Alfred Hitchcock – who doesn’t love The Birds?

A week later I was walking through Michael’s and lo and behold, there was the exact same crow. I couldn’t help myself – I bought it and hatched a plan. Jude was semi-scared of the crow, but the minute I told him it was Dan-Dan’s (his name for my dad), he was like, “oh. Okay.”  Now anytime he sees a crow, he says “Dan-Dan.”

One afternoon, we showed up over at Mom & Dad’s. Dad was taking a nap, and so I took the crow out to the garage with a roll of tape. In the back of Dad’s SUV, there was this huge cardboard box, and I taped the crow to the lid of the box so when Dad backed the car out of the garage, there would be the crow, like it just flew on in and perched on the top of the box. I showed Mom and she started to laugh.  The next day, I got a phone call – he didn’t even see that crow until he almost got out of the neighborhood onto the main street! He said that there were these big black crows that had been hanging out in the neighborhood lately, and then as he was driving, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the fake crow and thought, “Oh my gosh, how did one of them get in the car??!?!?!”

Anyway, it was a good little prank, and we’ve been having good fun with the crow ever since. One day, Mom set the crow up with breakfast:

At Jude’s birthday party, in particular, we all took “scared photos” with the crow, and I keep forgetting to post them.

Enjoy our craziness! 😉