Hallowe'en 2018

The one in which no one expected a witch-in-the-box...

For G-ma and G-pa Owen (with more snapshots to come)

In case you can't tell, we were all Wizard-of-Oz-y. I started the costumes the week before, calculating 5 days of costume-making, which I thought would give us a calm Hallowe'en, but then we ended up being out of town for 2 of those days.

Hot glue guns became my dearest friend; any semblance of reason and order my bitter enemy.

Anyway, I made six full costumes on Hallowe'en, as well as finishing up a couple of others, so you can imagine the halos gleaming. (Actually, I reeked of quiche.)  You know that smug old grandmother who was crowing nonsense last year? Well, she died of a heart attack somewhere around mid-afternoon on Hallowe'en Day, 2018, may she rest in peace.

The children and I were thrilled with how they turned out, though, chaos and shortcuts and all, and tomorrow I'll give due credit to internet geniuses (i.e. I'm a big copycat). We had a fun night once we got out of the house, and were again so grateful to live in the country, where half a dozen stops yield 2/3 a bucket of candy, leaving the second half of the night for leisurely strolls in town, where half a dozen stops yield six pieces of candy (tho' the folks are just as warm and genial, just not quite as chatty, to a passel of misplaced citizens of Oz).

 

I wish I was joking when I write that when we woke up the next morning the entire house looked like the dining room table and worse. NEXT year, it's low-key costumes and board games all the way...if only I can resuscitate Little Red's smug grandmother.

Real Time

Two days after Hallowe'en, and life has just slowed enough for the children to engage in the ritual Sorting of the Candy.

Aidan was allowed to pick out 15 pieces of his very own before (being forced into) donating the rest to a communal bag which goes to storage at Grandma's so that Someone does not eat it all before the children get a chance to.

Anyway, this morning after he filled his belly with homemade yogurt (full of probiotics!), I responded to his pleading by agreeing that he could have one piece of candy (full of poison!).

An hour later, one of my spies came and told me that he'd eaten more than one. When I asked him about it, he looked up at me, so tall and firm, with the most mournful face you ever did see.

"Did you eat more than one candy, Aidan?" I asked, with just the right amount of gentle but firm sternness, the sort that will elicit a truthful answer from a guilty party 1 time out of 10.

"Yeeeeeeees..." he replied, with even more mournfulness welling up.

"What did you eat, Aidan?" I tried again.

The mournfulness began to fade a bit, replaced by the righteousness of one who thinks he might be getting more firm and stern than he deserves. 

"Me ONLY ate one candy and then one air mattress," he said, slightly defensively.

He repeated this several times before I finally got it.

He ate an airhead.
Yum.

Splinter

The voice of the last cricket 
across the first frost 
is one kind of good-by.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.

______________________________


Thank you, Carl Sandburg.
Your words say it best.

Real Time

While making sauerkraut this morning, a nightgown-clad baby came into the kitchen for a visit, and I realized that you all needed an important update. In the last week, Skylark decided crawling is beneath her and gave it up nearly cold turkey.

She delights us beyond words.

Then Till Now and Things in Between

What a classy gardener, using living blooms to embellish her hat...

 

Aidan paired all the baby cars with Mama cars.

I remember that June spilled over with flowers and toads and dirt and swimming. We went swimming five times before June first, which has to be a record, and have gone so many times since, I lost count. We planted and weeded and mowed and weed-whacked, but those are a given. Heat lightning and lightning bugs sparked together on new-moon nights while Orion kept vigil. All manner of natural revelation sprang up, unrelenting, until we took notice.

July and August piled together into a jumble of family adventures and projects and rain for a month straight. The gardens we religiously weeded in June and July started rotting from rain with no respite, and my fervor for keeping the weeds under control subsided in direct correlation to the number of crops that failed. And now I sit with September looming, ready to make the space to settle thoughts and home. Both are tangled and weedy, all unruly from a riotous summer and in need of order.With so much to do, where do I start? With the blog, of course. Classic procrastinator's move...