The Modernish Father

Well, Halloween came and went and I think we managed to survive it without any major incidents. The Boy certainly made out well – all name brand candy, none of the crappy generic stuff you usually get. Not bad at all.

Halloween is great when you have two little ones. We were completely done and had both of them in bed by 8 p.m., which left The Wife and I completely free to partake in our normal old people Friday night activities – namely watching TV until we fell asleep.

The costumes worked well for both kids. The Boy dressed up as a knight, although his cape and shiny plastic outfit made him look more like a Darth Vader-Kaiser Wilhelm hybrid. And The Girl received many compliments in her baby chick costume, although lots of people thought it was a duck. I guess it doesn’t really matter either way. The Girl liked her costume as well, or at least the way it felt.

Our subdivision has an annual Halloween carnival with games and candy at our neighborhood park, so we all made the trip over there to partake in the festivities. The Boy played some his favorite games for candy, such as clothes-pin fishing and plinko, while The Girl was content to just sit around and take everything in.

After a few minutes of that, The Boy grabbed himself a snow cone (a sad commentary on the lack of proper autumn weather around here) and The Girl discovered that she likes to swing. The Boy also got a clown to make him a golf club out of a balloon, which was the highlight of the evening for him.

And then after about a half-hour, they were both done so we headed home. The Boy and I stopped at a few houses along the way to trick-or-treat, but we were all back home and the kids out of their costumes by 7:15. Simply outstanding.

As an added bonus, none of the other houses on our street were passing out candy, so none of the roving bands made it down to our house at the end of the street. Last year, we had some obnoxious bell-ringers and we were afraid that similar punks might wake up The Girl this year. Fortunately, our sour puss neighbors and their darkened porches made that an unfounded worry. Score one for curmudgeonly apathy!

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• One of the stop signs in our neighborhood has battery-powered Christmas lights attached to the back of it. That’s kind of random.
• When you stop to think about it, Halloween decorations are really very weird.
• If there’s anything worse than being lost, it’s being lost with a bad hair cut.
• When I hear people talking about how great the extra hour of sleep was last night, I want to punch them. My children didn’t get the memo about the time change and woke up at 5:00 this morning. Then they were both super cranky when their bedtimes were an hour later than their little biological clocks were used to. Another reason to abolish DST. Won’t anyone think of the children?
• The October photo gallery is complete. It has plenty of Halloween pictures, as well as a whole bunch of stuff that I never got around to blogging about.