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This year, the Halloween plan is a little different. Our daughter still wants to trick-or-treat with us, but our son has reached the Age of Mischief when he wants to run around with his friends, and my goal is for him to...well, just stay away from the eggs and/or toilet paper, or you are grounded forevermore, k? (He won't, he won't, but it's still going to be weird sending him off with his buddies, since I still remember him like...well, this.
SLAY, girl.
I have to say, I am super on board with my daughter's recent tradition of choosing Halloween costumes that are a little less Disney and a little more badass (hi, Lydia Deetz). Snow White, out. Katniss Everdeen, in.
This costume was almost embarrassingly simple to put together: I just picked up a bow and arrow from Party City and ordered a mockingjay pin and a braid off of Amazon, then picked through her wardrobe for some suitably Hunger Games-y attire - a leather jacket that once belonged to her brother, a grey tee, black leggings, and boots. Easy, easy.
This cake was, shall we say, a freewheeling design. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do for my son's annual Halloween-themed birthday party - an all-black cake (inside and out) with bugs somehow involved (because eight-year-old boys, et cetera), and I thought maybe it'd be cool to have the bugs sort of coming out of the cake as if they'd been inside, but when I got to the part where I'd actually do that, I was stumped.
I wanted a crack in the cake of some sort, but didn't want it to look like, you know...a mistake.
And then I remembered the geode cake. It's all over Pinterest these days, and I've been dying to try one, and you know what geodes have?! CRACKS. (Sort of; you know what I mean.)
YES, GIRL.
For the full duration of my trick-or-treating years - we're talking 3-13 - my mother crafted my costumes entirely by hand. They ranged from the truly extraordinary (a hand-stitched cancan dancer costume with multicolored ruffles that required multiple trips to visit a sewing-machine-having family friend in New Jersey) to the slightly phoned-in (a Cher costume that was basically a piece of sparkly fabric and a fright wig), but I cherished them. I cherish them still; many of those old costumes are now parked in my kids' costume box, and are just as serviceable as they were back in the day.
Things made by hand have a tendency to do that: they last.
This year, we will be doing the trick-or-treating thing with my friend Shannon and her family. I will be wearing my skull shawl, because skulls. My son will be in a Spiderman costume from Target, and my daughter will be in a Tinkerbell costume she ordered off of Amazon, and I have a feeling it will be slightly lower-key than it has been in past years, but also, it will be...
...
...you know. Halloween. Which means I am about to witness what pure joy in 7-year-old and 4-year-old form looks like. I may be exhausted already in anticipation, but I'm also (ssh) pretty excited.
Here is why I feel okay about the fact that I will be putting in something akin to "zero" effort re: my son's birthday party this year:
Because this was what I did last year, and he deemed it "okay. Not very spooky though."
So I think it safe to say we're dealing with a tough customer. And my feeling is, you know: y'all got a trampoline a week ago. You're welcome. (I will be making a spooky cake, of course, but the rest of the festivities will involve takeout Chinese and plastic eyeballs stuck on top of supermarket cupcakes, and it will be great, because I will be sane and he will be on a trampoline, and there you have it.)
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, according to my children: Sugar Month. Yes yes, Halloween is technically one day, but that little detail appears to have escaped my two sugar monsters, who are under the impression that the second those first leaves fall, it’s all-chocolate, all-the-time. (I blame grocery stores; can we PLEASE put those ten-pound snack-size assortment bags on shelves beyond the reach of a four-year-old? …Please?)
Herein lies the problem: When children know that candy is (allegedly) on the menu, they’re not super interested in anything else, and especially not in coming inside because dinner is ready. No, they’re very, very busy hiding on the front porch with the trick-or-treat buckets that they pulled out of storage sometime in August and filled with pilfered munchies, thinking that Mom doesn’t know what they’re up to. (Spoiler: Mom knows everything.)
I posted a video to Instagram Stories yesterday, and I'm really annoyed at myself about it. In the video, taken outside my son's piano teacher's house, I said that I had just realized that I'd forgotten to bring his piano music to the lesson for the second time in a row, and said it feels sometimes like my life is just one Mom Fail after the next. I forget the music. I'm late to pickup. I don't include vegetables in lunch (or dinner, sometimes). I love, love, love it when they're watching TV, because when they're watching TV I can breathe for a second.
The other day I ran into my friend as I was walking away from kindergarten drop-off - I'd been late, and had had to walk my son through the office (tardy slip! #momfail) - but she was later; so late that she wasn't even bothering to rush. We laughed when we saw each other - no words needed, because we've both seen each other be "that mom," the one frantically waving her arms and rushing past the horde of on-time parents walking in the other direction, yelling WAITWAITWAITWAITWAIT! while the door to the classroom shuts in our face.
Back to that video: My "I'm such a failure as a parent" video. I know that it's a teeny, tiny thing, forgetting your child's sheet music (even when you do it often). But as I dropped him off - flustered, my daughter crying from the car because she'd dropped her paper crown and couldn't reach it, hurriedly trying to explain during the second between the door opening and it closing again that it's totally my fault, I'm really sorry, I promise it won't happen again - I felt ridiculous, like a cartoon of a disheveled parent. Surely the "real" moms out there remember their child's music for piano class. Surely they don’t have to scream at their children to walk faster! in order to get them to class before the bell; surely they restrict screen time to an hour per day (weekends only!).
This photograph was taken in 1988, in case the crimped hair didn't tip you off.
Every year when I was a little girl, my mom would start making my Halloween costume in September. I might want to be a can-can dancer, or a character from Little House on the Prairie, or Cher (oh yes)...whatever it was, my mother would somehow pull out confusingly professional sewing skills that she apparently reserved solely for Halloween, and whip up a masterpiece of glitter and ruffles and perfection.
I am simultaneously sad about and relieved by the fact that kids these days ("kids these days"!! I'm so old) don't want homemade Halloween costumes. There was something grand - even heroic - about the fact that despite having no particular interest in crafting and exactly zero time to spare, what with her whole "being a lawyer" thing, my mother just rustled up her reserves and knocked it out of the park, year after year. And even when she didn't - my Cher costume consisted of a stretchy tube of sparkly fabric and the most unfortunate wig you have ever seen...it was still the only costume of its kind out there. It was mine. Made by my mom. I loved that.
OK, last post about this party - promise. (Maybe. It was SO FUN.) In these shots, you can see what we did with the decor, which went way further than last year's. My son had requested that the "whole house" be spooky, as opposed to concentrating our efforts in one space, and...ok, so that sounded a little intimidating, because I've never been one of those people who has a massive bin of, like, skeleton cats and spiderweb bowls in their garage. But one trip to Party City and one trip to the Dollar Store later?
Super spooky. (Or at least "semi-age-appropriately super spooky" - we wanted to mildly freak out the six-year-olds in attendance...as opposed to, you know, traumatizing them. I still remember the misty coffin that my neighbor set up in a faraway courtyard of our apartment building, and it still haunts my dreams, THIRTY YEARS LATER. That was not the goal.)
