Halloween 2012

Who would guess that the peanut-allergy kid in the family, the one who lost interest in the ward trunk-or-treat after about eight cars, would still manage to come home with like 300 of these (and not much else)?Pay Days? I didn’t even know they existed anymore. They do though. And every single one in existence was pulled, by some unseen pull of peanut toward peanut-abstainee into Jesse’s bucket.

That’s not totally true. One ended up in Goldie’s bucket.Which seemed only fitting since we recently discovered she is also allergic to peanuts. (I know, you would think a mother would know if her eight year old was allergic to peanuts . . . before she was eight, but I did suspect, it’s just that I don’t recall the last time she ate anything with peanut in it. She has avoided it like the plague for as long as I can remember. And if your child despises a substance and you think she might be allergic to it, you don’t really test it out. You just wait. You wait until they accidentally eat some at a large gathering and then swell up and hive up and then throw up repeatedly next to the food table. And then that’s how you know.)

But enough of this Pay Day Halloween business. I just had to laugh a little when I saw Jesse’s haul. I kept picturing that scene from the Charlie Brown Halloween special where everyone keeps announcing the treats they got and Charlie Brown has to keep saying, “I got a rock”. Only I pictured Jesse. And he was saying, “I got a Pay Day”.

Moving on. Goldie was Little Red Riding Hood at one point. And Snoopy at another. Abe was Charlie Brown at one point. And then someone with a faux-hawk and . . . stuff . . .  at another. His Charlie Browning never coincided with Goldie’s Snoopying. And Penny’s darling angel didn’t land on the day that we were actually taking more than three seconds to snap a picture. I don’t know how all these costumes come together, but I don’t begrudge them a second or third costume so long as they drag it out of the box of costumes rather than force me into getting more than one costume per child ready.

I do think Daisy’s witch turned out great. It was an old one of mine and much too long and large for her, but with the help of a bunch of safety pins and a strip of material tied around her waist to hide the extra bulk and pins, it turned out perfectly.

It will be a strange Halloween when wolf doesn’t make an appearance on one of my kids. Her angel was awfully cute though . . .


And someday, when Jesse is older, I know he will look back and say, “Mom, why did you make me be that monkey every single year of my life, even when it was several sizes too small?” So I am taking a moment now to tell him that he insisted on being monkey every single year despite all my encouragements towards other options . . . like, say . . . a nice wolf.


For Abe’s last year of trick-or-treating, he decided to go, pillow-case in hand, with a close friend (which explains his absence in the pre-trick-or-treat porch photo). And, as with all of our babies, Anders absolutely loved being put in that green monster costume with the velcro that scratches your neck.

Lastly, when Mike heard, early Halloween morning, that I was going in to help out with the party in Goldie’s class at school, and not wearing a costume, he seemed shocked at my part-pooperishness. . . . Which didn’t wholly seem fair. After all, I’d been partying my little heart out as I dug the innards out of six pumpkins for kids to jack-o-lantern up:

And decorated 5000 tables for the ward Halloween party, and costumed, and de-costumed, and re-costumed six kids for multiple Halloween events (all with no husband).

Still, I wasn’t about to sit there and hear that I was a stick-in-the-mud. So, with about ten minutes to spare before leaving to Goldie’s party, and with a quick call to my mom (who was coming out to babysit) for a scarf and some jewelry, I became a perfectly good gypsy. Or maybe pirate? Peasant? I don’t know, but surely Mike couldn’t accuse me of being no-fun now.

And that about does it for Halloween this year.