Halloween

Aden's fish, John, floats on life support in front of me. He endured an aquarium cleaning yesterday, with its accompanying cold water rinse and chlorine flux, and did not emerge the better for it. I have a feeling that the kids and I will drift in similar floppy unresponsiveness tomorrow. After going back to school today for Halloween parades and parties, and then tricking and treating tonight, the children will certainly have a sugar hangover. I enjoyed snapping photos of all three this morning at the parade, though; our school district usually has Fall Break during Halloween so this is only the second parade I have been to in six years at the elementary school. Kids of all ages dressed up, though the kindergartners won 'most enthusiastic' and one of the fifth grade classes chose not to even participate. Ah, the disenchantment of age.

The house lies ready for groups of children in disguise; our pumpkins leer on the front steps, candy waits on the refrigerator, periodically (and mysteriously) making an early exit out of the bag into someone's waiting mouth. Only last week our backyard snowman masqueraded as a summer baseball player, but today the weather recalls summer, and the kids can go trick or treating without the voluminous layers that always seemed to ruin our costumes as kids in Michigan. Laura from Little House was hard to pull off with winter coat and ski hat ballooning out from under my calico dress.

Halloween is really fun if you don't have to live with (or teach) the children after they consume large amounts of sugar. I ran into one of my favorite teachers at school this morning and she confessed that she had been up since 3:00am trying not to dread the day. She said that she and the kids were just going to "revel in it" because really, do we have any choice? I admit I plan to take large handfuls of the kids' candy to the dentist tomorrow - because I actually and crazily scheduled a cleaning for the day after Halloween - and will probably throw most of the rest away by Friday, but otherwise I plan to enjoy the festivities. Happy Halloween to all!