Next Friday Is Hawaiian Shirt Day!

So, y’know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.

It is not that having children around makes you more sentimental, more craft-oriented, more likely to care about holidays (or is it “holidays”?) like Halloween. It is that having children around, as in, all day every day, makes you more desperate for something to do, anything that is different, special, exciting and does not involve a playground or the library or the mall. Holidays are handy because the decision what will we do today? is made for you. You have a theme. I can work with any theme if someone hands it to me. Is next week DUCK WEEK? I can work with that.

And that, my friends, is why preschool is a good idea. Only one year (that’s 52 themed weeks!) to go!

So today is Halloween and I am so excited to have a theme, I am treating it like Christmas. My children are not going trick or treating because one of them is 6 months old and still working his way through the vegetables, one puree at a time and the other one, when he eats too much sugar it makes me want to lock him in a closet, so it’s extra double hazardous to his health. But I made Trombone put on his dog costume first thing this morning. I dug up last year’s duck bathrobe for Fresco. I took pictures. Earlier this week we went to the pumpkin patch and got pumpkins and carved them and roasted the seeds. This morning because it is pissing rain we took a short walk to the store ** and bought red dye 7 and yellow dye 5 to make orange frosting for the sugar cookies we were going to bake.

I almost bought a tin of white frosting to dye but it was the same price as a pound of butter and I reasoned that we needed butter anyway. Bad call; turns out we are all out of icing sugar so I had to switch frosting recipes mid-stream while Trombone dug at the butter with a spoon. The recipe I ended up with would have been fine except we ended up putting in too much brown sugar so it was quite brown and then adding red dye 7 and yellow dye 5 did not make orange but a sort of dried blood colour. So – it’s all cool. It’s Halloween and we have sugar cookies that look bled on. He should be glad I’m not making him do electric jello shots, the only Halloween tradition I have ever considered worth keeping.

** On our way to the store we passed the middle school, just letting out for recess. There was a kid in tight jeans, high heels, with a big, blonde, stringy wig and giganto hooters under a sparkly jacket. “Hmmm,” I thought, “they are correct, those talking heads, about the hoochification of young girls today. But – great Christina Aguiliera costume. Or is it Axl Rose?” Then the kid reached in, pulled out the bra stuffing (paper towels near as I could figure) and tossed it in the trash can. I got close enough to see that the hoochie-mama was a boy! A very brave teenage boy in drag. A very brave teenage boy in drag who was now being chased across the field by a group of boys dressed as a football team. Huh. I averted my eyes. I don’t want to think about middle school.