Lasts

When you have kids, you pay a lot of attention to firsts—the first tooth, the first word, the first step, all breathlessly anticipated, documented, and recorded. But lasts, those we often don't notice till long after the fact. When was the last time he fell asleep on my lap, or said "skabetti," or was small enough I could carry him? All lost to the mists of time.

Last year, as we were making our annual Halloween rounds of the neighborhood, I admit to thinking, "Thank goodness we're almost done!" Because kids can't go on trick-or-treating forever. Eventually they go away to college, right? (I remember thinking the same thing about breastfeeding and the family bed.)

So I surprised myself this year, when E and Z expressed ambivalence about the old trick-or-treat routine. Wait, I didn't know last year was going to be our last Halloween. And so, despite my own ambivalence, I coaxed them into Halloweening one last time.

E and I went out Tuesday afternoon and bought one of the last pumpkins at the apple orchard, which C helpt them carve into a great big eye (making use of a natural orifice in the pumpkin itself).


We had our usual jack-o-lantern bagel melts for dinner, which is as fancy as I get for Halloween vittles.



E and Z dug some old costume parts out of the dress-up bin.



And even I dressed up for the occasion.



We skipped the hay wagon, since it looked like rain, and our usual driver seemed less than enthusiastic, but we hit all the usual haunts, and spent the usual 10-20 minutes at each one, catching up with the whole neighborhood where C grew up.



It may not have been our last Halloween—who knows what the kids will want to do next year—but if it was, at least it was documented and recorded.

October in Review

October seems to have gotten away from me—there were many things I meant to post about, but somehow never got around to it.


It was a beautiful month, sunny and dry, until it wasn't (more about that in a minute). I got the kids to walk through our woods a few times and we even went on a family hike once (I have mentioned how no one likes to leave the house, haven't I?). Unfortunately, I didn't take along my camera for documentary evidence.

E and Z and I did a Van Gogh art project, with various interpretations of what that meant.

And we all made tie-died t-shirts, which is so much easier now, with squirt-bottles of concentrated dyes, than last time I tried it, 30 years ago, with dipping shirts in and out of buckets of watery Rit.

C and I did our best to wrangle the last of the garden produce. He made several large batches of tomatillo salsa and I boiled or roasted the rest of the tomatillos and froze them for winter cooking.


With the last of the VERY LARGE harvest of chile peppers (jalapeño and habanero), I made hot pepper jellies, hot sauces, roasted and frozen peppers, and dried peppers. That was a lot of peppers.



With the end of the month came a crazy wind-and-rain storm, which knocked power out for most of the state, littered roads with fallen trees and downed power lines, and drove most of the leaves off the trees (though the beech and oak hung on tight).


The upshot for us was NO SCHOOL for this whole week, with power out almost everywhere (except, thank you sun and solar panels and batteries, our house) and roads too hazardous for buses to pass through.

Three people in our house were pretty psyched about this development. I even got into the spirit of it for the first couple of days, playing Snow Day, baking cinnamon rolls and watching movies, but a whole week with a houseful of kids (and no internet) put a serious dent in my work flow.



Despite calls here and there to postpone Halloween until Friday (to which we said "Phooey"), we braved the dark and tree-littered streets to make our usual trick-or-treat rounds.



Our usual hay wagon being unavailable, we made do with C's work truck, which worked out nicely, as grown-ups got to sit inside for once (although it was such a mild night, it wouldn't have been bad to be in a trailer).



The power outages and candle-lit homes made for an extra-spooky Halloween-i-ness, and I think people appreciated a diversion from sitting around in their dark houses, listening to their generators run. And I think the kids appreciated being part of a lower-than-normal turnout that led to even more candy in their buckets than usual.

Halloween

Halloween kind of snuck up on me this year.



Maybe that's because October was warm. Or maybe it's because we spent the last two weekends having a Harry Potter marathon. Movie marathons were a big topic of conversation while we were hiking the Colorado Trail this summer, and the only one that appealed to me of the many suggested was HP, so I decided to make it happen. Somehow watching eight 2 1/2 hour movies in a single day seemed like a doable thing back when we were hiking in the mountains. It ended up being spread out over five days (there are certain members of this household who have suggested that it doesn't count as a "marathon"if the movies weren't watched contiguously. That member has been informed he's a party pooper). We started out strong and festive—with gold plates, pumpkin pasties, split pea soup, cauldron cakes, butter beer, Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. I even wore my academic robe from grad school graduation and wielded a wand. By the end we were eating burritos and miso soup, two foods I'm pretty sure never showed up at Hogwarts.




Or maybe it's because I didn't do much to prepare for it ahead of time, although I did take E and Z to two stores to buy Halloween costumes a couple of weeks ago—a first ever—and, much to my relief, they only ended up choosing a package of vampire fangs and a set of Ninja weapons. The costumes they carry at Target really are hideous.



Sunday night, after we finished The Deathly Hallows, Part II, I realized we hadn't even carved a pumpkin yet.



So the boys got busy after school, with their best bud, carving pumpkins and assembling do-it-yourself costumes from stuff we already had in the house—a skeleton mask (hand-me-down) for Z, and the ninja weapons and several layers of clothes for E (fat ninja). I really am a do-it-yourself kid of mom, as in, "Go do it yourself." So kids that can carve a pumpkin and pull costumes out of the closet are right up my alley.



We took our usual haunted hay ride around the "block" (we determined that we visit 14 houses and it takes us almost 3 hours—because every single house is either a neighbor or a parent of the kids C grew up with 30 years ago, so there is a lot of catching up to do at each one; we came close to but avoided any political skirmishes along the way). For the first year ever, M didn't join us. He had a lot of homework and studying to do. But E and Z didn't show any inclination of slowing down.



I heard Halloween described as the foot on the accelerator that will speed us through Thanksgiving and Christmas and into the New Year, which seems about right. Hang on for the ride!

By the end of the night, E's costume turns into a blanket wrapped around him to keep him warm on the trailer. 

Halloween

Hope you had a great one!

Halloween Redux

We got our costumes made, 

and our Jack o' lanterns carved, 

and we loaded on the hay wagon.

While Z's Legolas costume took a few hours of work, E was a skeleton, with a $5 mask and a black sweatsuit. After about the first few houses, he ditched the mask and called himself a "phantom."

No one noticed their costumes, anyway, everyone's attention was on C and M, dressed up as--and acting the part of--secret service agents to our friend's, scariest-of-costume-of-all, politician. 

I went dressed as a mom who wants to stay warm on the back of a trailer at the end of October in Maine. I know, I'm the least fun person ever. But I talked and laughed with our friends, while the kids snuggled under blankets and engorged themselves on candy. And except for the fact that no one gave out a single Butterfinger, it was a pretty good night.

Spiders for Your Halloween Shivers

I was taking a turn on the boys' slack line a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed something large and gray and furry hanging out under the webbing. My first reaction was full-body shudders, but my second was to grab the camera, because how often do you see a spider the size of a cherry tomato?

I decided to take the opportunity to learn more about spiders (with help from this article) and go through my photo archives in search of more spider pictures (because apparently that's a thing I do).

I took this picture (above)in our bathroom a few days ago (using my phone and the cool little phone macro I got C for his birthday). It's of a cellar spider--the type of spiders that make grungy old cobwebs. They like to hang out in the corners of houses and eat whatever happens along and gets caught in their messy and non-sticky webs. They are not to be confused with daddy longlegs, which, though arachnids are not spiders, and have only a single body segment (and, contrary to urban legend, do not have venomous bites). We had a daddy longlegs on our bathroom ceiling one night, and by the next morning, it was caught in a web and this guy was dining happily on it.

Look closely at the opening in the web above and you'll see a little grass spider, a type of funnel weaver whose webs you never notice until a dewy summer morning when they appear all over lawns. These spiders hang out at the mouths of their funnels and when the web is disturbed, they either run our and snatch their prey or scurry back inside their funnels to wait for an intruder to pass on.

When you think of the classic Halloween spider web, you're thinking of the web woven by an orb weaver spider. My little (big) furry friend in the first picture is an orb weaver (possibly spotted or cross).

More commonly seen, though are these black and yellow argiope, who hand out during the day and weave a zig-zag shape, or stabilimentum, in the center of their webs.

I've always known these as "garden" spiders and if you find one near your garden, you're in luck, because they will help control and pests that might come along to try and eat your produce.

I'm guessing Charlotte was an agriope.

If any spider can be considered "beautiful" by human standards, it is the argiope, and perhaps the next spider on our tour, the goldenrod crab spider, which hangs out on yellow or white flowers and can change its color to match its home.

I'm not exactly phobic of spiders and I try not to kill them (thanks to this book, which was a childhood staple, but which I have inexplicably never gotten ahold of for my own children), but I don't love them running around my house and I try to evict them to the outdoors when I find them (which, in January amounts to a death sentence, I suppose). The worst was when Z and E were playing blocks when they were about three and I came into the living room and saw Z watching a big brown spider (I think it was some type of nursery web spider) crawl up his arm, over his shoulder and down his other arm. "Let's take that spider outside," I said, taking his wrist and tugging him toward the front door. "He my pet," Z replied as I hustled him to the front step and brushed the spider off. I still get the shivers picturing that spider scuttle all over my baby. I know it's aesthetic and irrational, since the colorful and pretty spiders don't make my skin crawl at all. I'm working on it, but since today's Halloween, the shivers is a perfectly reasonable reaction.

Halloween Nostalgia

As I was putting together Z's costume, I couldn't help thinking back to Halloween six years ago--the last time I put a lot of effort into costumes, or perhaps the last time I had fun costumes to work on.

E insisted he wanted to be a butterfly. A friend of mine brought me a fairy costume--complete with pink tutu, gauze wings, and a magic wand--from a thrift sale she had been to, but I had something else in mind, and made big, felt monarch winds, instead.

Z planned on being something else--I can't remember what--but at the last minute, he decided to be a butterfly, too. When I went back to the fabric store with the wool felt (a tiny, one-woman place), it was closed while the owner was away. So I pieced together the scraps into a black swallowtail, staying up past midnight October 30, and spending all day Halloween sick on the couch with the flu.

Meanwhile, M was still in his money phase, so I made him a bow tie and handkerchief out of coin-printed fabric, and we glued play money to the inside of his goody bag, and, with a hand-me-down double-breasted jacket, he was transformed into a millionaire.

That year was the birth of our hayride trick-or-treat tradition--I couldn't face trading carseats for wings for carseats at every stop along our circuit.

Our butterfly wings are long gone--borrowed and never returned--the jacket is long outgrown (and possibly never again worn) by everyone.

We still take the hayride on Halloween, and we still visit the chainsaw massacre yard. We still manage to come home with gallons of candy, after visiting only a dozen or so homes. We've moved into more sophisticated costumes (Z's Legolas) or more traditional Halloween costumes (E will be a skeleton). That's fun, too, but I can't say I don't miss those adorable little butterflies and the swanky millionaire.