BeLikeMichael’s Halloween 2008

Halloween was actually fun this year.  Really, I had fun schlepping the kids around to parties, neighbors and friends’ houses.  My kids were a little out of sorts at first, but they got into the swing of things and had fun.  We ended up having a Tinkerbell and a dinosaur, and, of course, I dressed up as the BeLikeMichael blogger, a popular costume out East.

High Points:

• trick-or-treaters only emptied our “take 2 or 3 please” bowl once,
• my jack-o-lantern survived the evening and suffered only one hit to the face, 
• all the kids we treated were VERY polite and grateful, 
• saw some good friends and neighbors (one neighbor even got my kids some Halloween books), 
• one kid was even collecting for UNICEF, AND, we believed he really was,
• to my pleasant surprise, my faith was restored in a “holiday” I haven’t really enjoyed in a long time

Low Points:

• Didn’t get the bags of candy I’m used to from my childhood, 
• candy ingestion now coupled with slight guilt that NEVER existed in childhood, 
• those hideous Obama/Palin effigies, 
• I secretly wanted some kid to totally S-M-A-S-H my pumpkin

Now, on to Tuesday’s election.  It’s hard to believe this country’s going to change soon.  I would say, “…hopefully for the better”, but I do believe it can’t be much worse than it was for the past eight years.

VOTE EARLY.

VOTE OBAMA.

VOTE OFTEN.

See you on Wednesday in our changed country; I’ll either be very happy and hopeful for our country’s future, or I’ll be annoyed that I’m gonna have to endure Sarah Palin and the Republicans for four more years.

Speaking of Candy…

So Halloween’s coming, right?  Now that I’m not much of a candy eater, I could really care less about Halloween, EXCEPT now that I have kids, I’m actually sorta looking forward to it.  Sure, we’ve already picked out their costumes and we’ve already purchased the prunes we’re handing out this year, but the real fun’s going to be taking the kids around to our friends and neighbors.

Neither of our kids have really ever had candy yet, so we’re probably going to severely limit (read: take it all to Mom’s work) what they ingest.  I never understood these parents that complain endlessly about how their kids never eat anything healthy, while they stock their houses with nothing but ice cream and chocolate chip cookies and then let the kids splurge on pure sugar on Halloween.  Then they wonder why the kid’s as big as a house by age thirteen.

I do have a candy-related question — see there is a point to all this rambling: has anyone on earth ever actually eaten one of those orange marshmallowy circus peanut candies?  My entire life I always thought their sole purpose was to be squooshed in their unopened bags on store shelves by bored suburban kids; goodness knows I’ve squooshed more than a few hundred dozen in my misspent youth.  Come to think of it, I may buy a bag for our next shindig at the house just to see what conversations get started.  I bet they taste like crap, though.