Cold Spaghetti

Despite my illness, we did manage to take the kids Trick-or-Treating. We went to Georgia and Emmy‘s so that the kids could explore the neighborhood en masse and we had enough support to let me rest if and when needed.

Georgia had a great party with yummy food, including delicious chili, homemade mac-n-cheese, and a movie theatre popcorn popper machine dispensing fresh kernels in red and white stripped bags. The kids took turns filling their assorted trick-or-treat bags with party candy and then putting the candy back in the cauldrons.

We got to spend some quality time with baby Ollie. Emmy kept calling him a little peanut while getting the kids in costume (I got to hold and burp the baby). Then she dressed him in his costume — he really WAS a peanut.

Everyone got in some baby time.

Wittle baby peanut!

Will and Kate stripped their impromptu costumes from the day and donned fresh personae: Will was Mike Wicowski from Monsters, Inc (a CCEX find last fall) and Kate wore her gorgeous red suit, a gift from Randy and Katherine on one of their trips to Taiwan.

Will had the Trick-or-Treat thing down this year. No need to prompt or remind, he knew how to negotiate the door knocking and opening, used the correct parlance for transaction, and held his bag or reached appropriately in the right situations. Kate, on the other hand, preferred to take one piece of candy at a time, bringing it in her tight little fist to the next door, where she would offer the kind Treater a trade: new candy for the warm mushed one in her hand. They would offer to fill her bag with candy if she’d hold it open, to which she’d reply, “no thank you.”

Both kids were pretty much ready to be done with the whole thing after one house, just to go eat what they had collected. It wasn’t until we were done that they realized the power of volume. You could actually see Will’s wheels turning as he understood that longevity of the trick-or-treat was a strategic choice. Whoops. He’s asked if we can count down the days ’til next Halloween ’cause he’s REALLY READY NOW.

Here’s a video of them in costume preparing for the Big Event…

Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to make Will’s spider costume. Because Will may have been cool with the whole spider-thing, but Kate has absolutely no interest in her Little Miss Moffett bonnet. Will, on the other hand, was thrilled to pose with it.

Is that a seriously nice bonnet or what? And for $8. You can get one made in any fabric you can think of from here. Sheesh, makes me want to wear a bonnet, too.

Maybe next year?

Do you know what the room of a 4- and 2- year old looks like after a morning searching for costumes to wear to school? It’s not pretty.

But we pulled it off. Thankfully, I’d picked up some sale items over the past few years… including a cowgirl hat and cowgirl boots. Both of these were purchased on outings when Paul was not around to glare disapprovingly. I am using this as an example of my Good Shopping Skills, which have now proven themselves to be Very Valuable in a pinch.

Along with a horse-y shirt, Kate became a cowgirl! We worked on “Yee-haw!” all morning. At 9:30, we joined her at school for a little Halloween party.

She was quick to find many good uses for her cowgirl hat. “Daddy? What do you mean I can’t have a pony?!”

Then they had a puppet show. Kate walked herself upstairs and sat in the front row, without thinking twice about her parents, stuck in the back with the babies (they were a little freaked out by the intense cheese brought by the puppet man.) Luck for him, Kate LOVES cheese. All kinds. She ate it all up and especially liked the guy’s cat, Dinah. (His ghost was named Blythe. Chuckle, chuckle.)

She just took it all in, wild horsewoman that she is.

And seriously, it took honest effort.

She didn’t even notice us leave after the performance. She is SO OVER us!

Then, at 2, we visited Will’s BATMAN’s school. He was cruisin’ the play-yard in his Batmobile.

Inside, the kids’ artwork decorated the cafeteria. That face in the center is the work of Batman, himself.

Then, the Kindergarten put on a Maori-inspired song and dance, wearing Maori-inspired skirts that they made. (Their study of Australia has branched out to New Zealand.)

We figured Will did pretty well with the words and movements, considering he’d missed three days of school recently for our trip north.

His favorite part was “aou, aou, aou, aou-aou-aou!”

After their performance, guess who was waiting? Yup, same guy from the morning. His shtick went great with the older crowd, though. And when he needed a BAT, guess who got called up?

See that handsome guy in the background? He recorded it all. A prince among men, I tell ya.

Thanks to Paul’s recording prowess, here’s an incredibly reduced-quality video of the Maori-song and dance. My favorite part is when Will hitches up his pants about 50 seconds in. AOU!

When I was a kid, my Dad was away a lot. As a good Navy family, my Mom, Grandmother, brother, and I would adapt our holidays as needed to when Dad was around. Celebrate a birthday a few months late. Hunt for eggs on an odd day. The calendar was secondary to us being able to be together as a family.

So now I am a Mother of two and it’s the day before Halloween and I am sick. Like, had to go and suck down medicine in a tube in an Urgent Care sick. It’s a head cold turned bronchitis with some sort of nasty sit-on-your-chest-til-ya-wheeze side effect. I’m hawked up on a bunch of steroids and antibiotics and inhalers, weak in the knees and in bed while Paul — poor Paul — handles his job, our kids, and a whole house of cards just tumbling down, one by one, on his hurting head.

Halloween could not come at a worse time. The spider costume isn’t made (I bought the toilet seat covers for the spider body and have the black tights for legs). Will is going to wear his Batman pajamas to school tomorrow — at his request, chosen over my initial offer of his last-year’s Peter Pan — and Kate? Well, she was suppose to be the Little Miss Moffett to Will’s spider, wearing a simple blue dress that is in no way costume-y, but paired with a bonnet (this woman is amazing), and a little sign about ‘curds and whey,’ I figured we could make work. But for school tomorrow? I didn’t think about this. I wonder if last year’s Tinkerbell still fits her? (It’s 12 months size… unlikely.)

Are we the world’s worst parents if we forgo Halloween?

Can we turn it into a belated punishment for all that not-listening in weeks past? (Okay, I admit, this seems unduly evil.)

But what if we just can’t do it? What other options do we have?