Happy Trick-or-Treating!

It dawned on me as we journeyed around our neighborhood this evening that in his memory, this the first time Ethan has been trick-or-treating. He went as an infant the first time we took Emry. The following year he went and loved it, but he wasn’t even two. Last year, as it snowed about two inches, we were in the backyard in snow gear and not super heroes searching the neighborhood for candy. This year, though, the weather was rather pleasant and the walk quite nice.

 

Yes, yes, people didn’t come out in droves. Afraid someone would toss Covid in the kids’ bags instead of candy. But since we don’t have anyone in the neighborhood that works for the CDC (that we know of), that didn’t happen. And those who did come out, whether to trick-or-treat or to hand out candy, seemed to enjoy the socializing and just being neighborly – even if some took the mask precaution. And even though I heard a neighbor say the turn out was way down, the kids still came home with enough candy to last until next Halloween.

 

Ethan had a blast. He was on top of the world, dashing up people’s driveways shouting, “Happy Trick-or-Treating!” (I’m not sure he ever realized the holiday is actually called “Halloween”.) Over and over as we trooped along the sidewalks, he exclaimed, “This is awesome!” Only when we left one particularly spooky house did he state emphatically at least three times, “That was not awesome! That was scary!” But he had no nightmares or anything over it, so the excitement far outshone anything scary.

 

Emry seemed to take it all in stride. Come to think of it, she always has. She’s not overly excited, but she is friendly with the neighbors, polite, and points out the costumes of others. She careful as she crosses the street. She warns Ethan when he’s overly zealous. And if you ask her if she had fun, she states simply, “Yep.” Perhaps she went to the same trick-or-treating training course her cousin Beto did. He joined us that evening with Grandma (my mom) who, trying to be sure he knew the proper etiquette of saying “trick-or-treat” and “thank-you” was informed that he knew all that already: he had been trained.

 

And Ellyson? She was just delighted to be outside, sitting in her stroller and taking it all in. She lovesbeing outside.

 

Spider Man (Ethan), Ellyson and Elsa (Emry

Pictures!!!

By child number three, the amount of pictures taken becomes much lower than child number one and even lower than child number two. But I am trying, and I wanted to share. Because isn’t she soooo cute?

A New (Old) Word

It isn’t often I come across a “new” word. I mean, a goodnew word. Not words that have been redefined, which is what “new” words usually are in this day and age. People simply take a perfectly good word (or name) and redefine it until some of us are nearly afraid to use it. So, like the word I just discovered, really good “new” words are usually old words I’ve just never heard.

 

Several weeks ago I was reading a book about one of George Washington’s army brigades who earned the name “The Immortals”. The author quoted out of journals he had come across and in one of those entries, a man described the Continental Army as a bunch of “tatterdemalions”.

 

Now that, I thought, is a fun word. So fun I had to say it aloud. And then look up what it means.

 

Tatterdemalion: ragged or disreputable in appearance; being in a decayed state or condition; dilapidated

 

Yes, I would say that is a very good way to describe the Continental Army. And it rather sounds just as it means.

Why don’t we use good words like that anymore?

Fish #2

Actually, this post is months late. I thought about posting it months ago, but I had other things I wanted to write about instead. And while the people I work with would never believe me if I told them I do procrastinate at times (they have taken to putting “No Rush” in their e-mails when I don’t have to do that project in the next five minutes)…well, I do – sometimes – procrastinate.

 

You may recall a couple of months ago that we bought Emry a fish. A pet, it would seem, that is not as simplistic as I would have thought. (But it is 2020, so nothing is simplistic.) We brought “Pink Flower” home and I followed all the rules the lady at the pet store yammered off to me…or so I thought. The fish wasn’t in the tank for two days before it died.

 

I found it that night, hoping against hope that it was…sleeping? But it wasn’t. And I started to cry. I don’t believe in all my forty years I have cried over a pet before. I haven’t had a lot of pets and I didn’t really get emotionally involved with the few I had. But I cried over this dead fish. It would be easy to wave it aside as hormones (which was probably part of the problem), but I really didn’t know how I was going to tell Emry. Her first longed for pet had died. And I was pretty sure I had somehow killed it. Not intentionally, of course, but somewhere in the long list of instructions I had failed to follow something. And now I had a dead fish. And the prospects of one very said little girl. 

 

And she was sad. Although she shed a lot less tears than I did. And we took her back to the pet store that very day to get a new fish. For the one glimmer in all of this was we had a two-week warranty on the fish (it came with that for free) so we didn’t have to pay for a new one! I also brought in a sample of the water from the tank for them to test and asked the lady for very specific instructions on how to get this fish safely into our tank. Since our water tested just fine for this new fish’s survival, I carefully followed the instructions. And “Green Star” the fish is still with us!

 

To be honest, this little greenish blue Beta fish is a surprisingly fun little thing. It comes up to you when you go to look at it. (Which I do quite a lot…still fearful this one will die on me, too!) It seems to know Emry, who is very faithful to feed it each morning. Even Ellyson enjoys watching it. I never thought a fish had a personality, but this one almost seems to. So, all in all, the whole adventure of our first pet has turned out quite well. 

And now Emry reminds me weekly that she is ready for a dog…and a cat…

Jack-o-Lanterns

As a kid I have memories of getting pumpkins (some of them we grew, but I’m not sure where some of them came from when we lived in the south) and cutting jack-o-lanterns. It was yet another one of those artistic things I really wanted to be good at and do wonderfully creative montages you see on Pinterest. But like most arts and crafts, I got terribly bored and frustrated with it half way through cutting out the first triangular eye. My very few jack-o-lanterns were never works of art.

 

With my own kids we have only done jack-o-lanterns once before and that was the October after Ethan was born. I don’t remember why we did it. I imagine it was something Ed wanted to do and we had been to a local farm to get a pumpkin or two anyhow for me to cook and puree for baking. This year, though, Emry and Ethan have both seen jack-o-lanterns in enough books to want to do it themselves. So, they each got a pumpkin.

 

Of course the “do it themselves” would me too much at the ages of 3 and 5. So while they drew the faces they wanted and helped scrape out the seeds and pulp, Mama did all the cutting. And this is how we made jack-o-lanterns today:

 

Step 1: draw directions so Mama knows what we’re doing. (This was their own idea…like most kids they don’t believe I did anything before they came along.)

 

Step 2: cut the tops open and scrape out the insides, keeping the seeds for roasting. (There is no picture for this step. I was up to my elbows in pumpkin insides and Ed had yet to come out and join the fun.)

Step 3: draw the face on the pumpkin.

 

Step 4: act goofy, chatter a mile a minute, and generally ask how much longer is this going to take while Mama cuts out the faces.

Step 5: show off the jack-o-lanterns!

 

Step 6: wait until almost dark to go out and light them, shivering with both delight and cold.