The End of Halloween (I Promise)

Thought I'd grab a moment while the kids continue overdosing on sugar to let everyone know that Halloween here was a rip-roaring success. Larry took the 4 youngest to a zillion houses and they came home bearing approximately 46 pounds of candy each. Which we promptly took away. Just kidding - we waited until they finally went to bed and then we took it away. Except for a few pieces, which they are working on now.

Susie dropped out after about 50 houses and came home and sat on the floor and devoured candy. It was awesome to watch. She ate and ate and ate. At one point, she had 3 different lollipops going, and an open pack of Skittles. What finally slowed her down was when she peed in her (pretty darn absorbent) pumpkin costume.

Anna went trick-or-treating with a neighborhood friend. Because the friend's family is just so cool and not horribly embarrassing like ours. Not that I am bitter or anything.

This morning we walked to the bagel shop for breakfast and the kids picked up dropped candy from the ground. Because they didn't eat enough last night. Happily, they didn't mistake the round piece of dog poop for chocolate.

I chopped up our jack-o-lanterns today - darned if I'm going to let those stupid squirrels eat them instead of us. And before all you slackers start commenting on how you don't even know how to cook pumpkin, let me just point out that it's easy - you hack the pumpkin apart, take off the rind (that's the dark orange part, for you cooking novices out there), and you cut the rest into chunks and throw it in your crockpot on high all day. (Oh, and make sure the crockpot is plugged in. The food cooks faster that way.) That's all there is to it. And it sure beats throwing 20 dollars worth of pumpkins in the trash.

At least, that's how I felt before I spent an hour chopping up one and a half pumpkins and then realized I still had at least 2 hours to go. Now, I'm not so sure. If I'm saving 20 dollars by not throwing out the pumpkins, but it takes me, say, 4 hours (including clean-up) to do it.....that's 5 dollars an hour. I think I'd earn more working at Target, and I'd get an employee discount, too.

But which is better for my career, pumpkin-hacking or customer service? That is the question. I wonder what Hillary would say....

Sugar Babies

I have to say (again) that it is astonishing how many people are (still) googling "tornado costume." And the folks googling it this afternoon are really under the wire, as it were. I should give them the idea we finally came up with, since Brian has decided (are you ready for this?) that he wants to go as a bat after all. A bat. Not a tornado. Larry and I are definitely going to eat that kid's candy first.

So here we are, Halloween day, and the kids are already so sugared up that they can't see straight. For starters, I totally ran out of breakfast comestibles; so I fed them apple pie for breakfast. Then, they spent an hour this morning stuffing candy into treat bags (don't ask why we bother doing that - tradition, all right?) while freely sampling it to make sure it was okay. Later, Rachel bumped her head somehow and got a popsicle, so Brian and Susie had sympathy popsicles - the really junky kind that come in a box of 800 for 2 dollars and are comprised of food coloring and sugar and water. I think I managed to fit some real food in there for lunch, but my friend brought over ghost-shaped marshmallow thingies for dessert. Like bringing coals to Newcastle...

So...only 3 more hours to trick-or-treat. The baby has been screaming for candy pretty much non-stop today, and I myself am on Almond Joy overload. Now everyone is just dancing around in their costumes and asking when they can go out. Even jaded Anna is dressed up (and not as Medusa, as Theo had suggested). Whew - I don't know how much more of this I can take. I didn't even bother planning dinner. Nothing like making the kids sit down and eat something healthy when every other minute someone is at the door asking for candy. It's like trying to have a Weight Watcher's meeting at the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

David's robot costume came out great. All we had to do was cut some armholes in a box and cut a few pieces of dryer duct whaddayacallit, and he did the rest (which, um, fulfills my definition of a great costume, I guess - when the kid does the work). Rachel is a fairy princess or whatever you call a person wearing a very pink, floaty dress with a pointy pink hat. And toddling Susie is a round little pumpkin. But she refuses to put any clothes on underneath the pumpkin costume. Which makes it fairly risque (I mean, for a pumpkin) - spaghetti straps that tie into bows on the shoulders and nothing on the legs. Aside from the fact that I worry she will be too cold, I don't want to be one of those accused of sexualizing little kids' Halloweens. One minute they're innocently dressing as almost naked pumpkins; and before you know it, they're pole-dancing for college spending money. It's a slippery slope, isn't it?

Theo is thinking of dressing up, too - as a plumber (what can I say? Rachel's antics last year have really inspired him, career-wise). Why should he go to college, he wonders, if he can make all that money fixing toilets?

Time to go whip up some chocolate bars for dinner.

Rite of Passage

Okay, let's just try to forget about Halloween and tornado costumes and half-eaten bags of candy pumpkins that the trick-or-treaters are never going to see - just for a little bit, okay? The holiday excitement here has reached a fever pitch, and I need a little break.

So....Sunday I took my son Theo out with his brand-new driver's permit. Theo is my oldest, which means that this was a brand-new experience for me. Nothing, I mean, nothing - not getting married, not giving birth, not realizing that you like to go to sleep by 9:30 - nothing makes you feel as suddenly, irretrievably aged as putting your first-born baby boy behind the wheel of an honest-to-goodness motor vehicle. My brain essentially flipped itself inside out trying to comprehend how, in a time span encompassing approximately 15.8 seconds, I went from trying to figure out how to buckle in Theo's infant car seat to showing him how to adjust the driver's side mirror. I know you parents out there who have already been through this are smirking and saying, "Novice!", just as I do when I read about some young parent worrying about how to make a 2-year-old behave; but, dear Lord, how did this happen? Where did the time go? How did I get so old?

Okay, okay, I'm going to calm down. I am glad to report that I only slammed on the imaginary brake once (okay, twice) during the entire 2-hour session. Although I noticed, once I pried my clenched fingers off it, that the passenger-assist handle that Honda thoughtfully places above the passenger-side door seems to have worked itself a bit loose. Theo had a great time and asked lots of questions, such as "If the speedometer goes up to 120, does that mean the car can go that fast?" (Over your dead body) and "Gee, can we go out on the road now?" (No, not until you learn to stop the car before the stop sign). And the whole time I was thinking, "There are 5 more kids after this one. I cannot survive this." We did leave the nice, big, safe parking lot to go out on the road (the very untrafficked side roads) at the end, with me praying that he wouldn't slam into someone's parked Volvo or Lexus (we live in an affluent neighborhood, and no, I don't know why they let trailer trash like us own a home here, either). I didn't let him go over 25 mph (let's face it, it's my one and only chance to control how he drives). We made it home, in one piece and undented, but I feel as though I aged 10 years.

I have a child that drives. I am officially old.

Problem Solved

Larry attempted to construct a wearable tornado for Brian yesterday. Not wanting to get in the way, I took Theo out in the car with his brand-new driver's permit (that's another post - I haven't gotten to the point where I can talk about it yet.) Anyway, we came home, 2 hours and one undented car later (whew!), to find Larry and Brian gone, and a heap of tangled plastic fencing lying on the living room floor. I correctly deduced that Plan A had failed and that they had gone off to Home Depot to purchase materials for Plan B (have I mentioned that we spend more on Halloween than we do on Christmas around here?). Anyway, they returned bearing....weed barrier. Yup. I must have looked a little concerned, because Larry said, "See? No problem - we'll just wrap this stuff around him and we'll have a tornado!" Okay.

10 minutes later, poor little Brian (peering uncertainly out of the small space left for his face) looked as though he was wearing a burka. Or maybe he was trying to dress like a mummy wearing a burka. "Don't worry," Larry reassured me. "Once we tape a few plastic animals and some toy cars to it, it will look like a tornado." At this point I had to say, "Um, no, it will look like someone wearing a burka with toy animals and cars taped to it. And someone will think we are making some weird political statement about American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, I don't think so..."

Apparently, this was just the out Larry was looking for, because he sort of threw his hands up in the air and exclaimed, "Fine! You figure something out then!" May I just point out here that Larry was the one who encouraged Brian in his tornado imaginings? I wanted the kid to be a bat, a costume we already have.

Are irreconcilable costume differences ever stated as grounds for a marital breakup? I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, I dashed out to Michael's for a dollar's worth of posterboard and we cut out sort of a tornado shape to hang around Brian's neck and explained to him that we would glue the toy animals and cars onto that, and that's when he started to cry. And he asked why we couldn't make the costume the way he wanted to do it. Which was, it turns out, devastatingly simple. And, no, I don't know why neither of us asked him in the first place.

So on Wednesday night, Brian will go out happily attired in the aforementioned bat costume, with cotton balls taped all over the hood (it's a cloud, see?) and animals and cars and such taped all over the cape/wings and he'll be able to twirl around and pretend he is a tornado, and that is all he ever wanted to do in the first place. And, boy, do we feel stupid.

Maybe I can e-bay the plastic fencing and the weed barrier, and buy Larry some beer with the money. Then maybe he'll start talking to me again.

Butterflies are made to fly....

Well, I seem to have tapped into some cultural zeitgeist for Halloween here. You would not believe how many people out there are googling "tornado costume" (and landing on my blog). Larry's still working on the costume concept here - he hauled home some heavy-duty plastic fencing from Home Depot. I think chicken wire would have been more malleable, but Larry said it was too sharp. To which I said, "So?" These kids should suffer a little for all that candy, don't you think so?

Where was I? Oh, yes, so today Larry was attempting to demonstrate how he was going to make this not very bendy fencing into a tornado costume by wrapping it around Brian's body, like so (and here he executed a very interesting pirouette while attempting to surround himself with the aforementioned material and I still can't believe I didn't have the camera handy). It's always a little scary when Larry takes over the costume design. Maybe it's a guy thing, but he heads to Home Depot instead of Michael's and tends to end up constructing costumes that are, well, very heavy-duty. The year Anna (age 8 or so) wanted to be a butterfly is a good example. Larry obtained some very heavy cardboard and cut out wings and spray painted the whole thing yellow and black (he even studied a picture of a tiger swallowtail in our butterfly book for guidance); in short, he worked a long time and made some very impressive-looking butterfly wings which spanned about 3 feet across and over 2 feet from top to bottom. He then proceeded to fasten them to Anna's little back by securing them with some heavy duty cables around her tiny waist, at which point, of course, she burst into tears. Because the costume didn't exude that flitty, floaty butterfly effect that she was after. She ended up wearing it (what choice did she have, after all the work that went into it?), but we had a real problem with her knocking smaller trick-or-treaters over with the wings as she turned around on people's front steps. And she never dared ask to be a butterfly again.

So, I'm really curious to see what Larry comes up with this time. Whatever it is, you can rest assured that it will be sturdy. And original. Stay tuned....