Trick-or-Treat!

Happy Halloween! This halloween is my son, Jackson's, first one. I had thought it would be so much fun to dress his, not so little, 9 month old body up in a cute lion costume. I even worked with him this week on how to "Roar!". Forget saying trick-or-treat, after all he is only 9 month's old. Jack-Jack (as we have started calling him for some weird reason) has a somewhat limited vocabulary at this point. Mostly ba-ba,da-da,ma-ma....you get the jist. But he could almost get out a roar.
Yesterday Jack-Jack comes down with a fever and runny nose. He's still not himself today. So, no trick-or-treating for him tonight. I've realized I'm more bummed out about it than he obviously is. I'm sure he'll have just as much fun answering the door with me to our neighborhood kids in their costumes. Although, his older sister, Madison, is disappointed with his not going out with her. Only because it means a lot less candy at the end of the night for her to have. Oh well.
Madison is excited to dress up in her red dragon costume. My oldest daughter, Katy, will be dressing as the famous hockey player Mario Lemieux. She continues to love playing ice hockey on her all girls team and watching the Pittsburgh Penguins play on T.V.
Halloween has changed quite a bit since I was a kiddo out there trecking through our neighborhoods with my heavy pillowcase. I remember the smell of the glue in the masks of those old costumes that my mom would buy at the store. Now, I'm really dating myself. But these costumes would come in square boxes with clear fronts so you could see the mask inside.
At the time I lived in the north east, so I always had a size or two larger costume to fit my extra layers of clothing on underneathe. I would go house to house like all the other kids in my neighborhood. Except for the one extra "spooky" house on the street. Ya know the one, every neighborhood has one. It''s the one where the owners go all out, spooky music, tombstones, and some crazy person in an all to real costume popping out at you when you went up to try to get a candy bar. Also, after a few halloweens, we knew which houses to skip. The ones who gave out pennies, or toothbrushes or anything "healthy". And also, the ones where the one old guy or lady would constantly come out and yell at the neighborhood kids to "get the H-e-double hockey sticks off of their yard".
I probably wasn't alone in the fact that I was forbidden to actually eat any of my loot until it has been screened by proper security at home. My parents would empty out the pillowcase onto the floor or table and go through each and every candy or whatever was in there to make sure it was "safe". At the time, I thought it was irritating. Now,as I parent, I get it. I love that my parents did that for me.
Now adays, we hardly see many trick-or-treaters. We live in a large neighborhood with lots of kids. But for some reason not many of them actually go out for halloween. I always buy way too many bags of candy to give out. Don't want to have to turn the porch light out early because I ran out of candy. Ugh. Anyway, I guess like most everything else, things change. Atleast, the holiday still gives me a reason to see my girls get all excited to dress up in cute costumes and also an opportunity to teach my smallest one to roar!!!
Happy Halloween!

I type faster than I write.

OK, so I type faster than I write. A lot faster. I've kept written journals for most of my life. Off and on. Sometime in the past few years I started not being able to keep up with my thoughts with handwriting and the time just never seems to be there anymore to get much of anything done. I have all this junk running around my brain. I need to get it out. My brain is on complete overload. This is where and why I find myself here. At a blog. Let's see if even my fingers can keep up with my thoughts.