Halloween

The kids had a great start to the week.  Monday they completed their school work in a timely manner and then spent the afternoon at their friend's house celebrating his birthday.  Since their friend couldn't have a party this year, he had different friends over on different days.  Our kids got to play Super Mario and Minecraft and eat cake and pizza and they rode bikes and had Nerf gun battles.  They had a ton of fun.  I, too, had an amazingly quiet afternoon.  Those are few and far between, so I relished it.  

This week we signed the kids up for free art lessons online.  The Creativity School that puts it on has a sampler week where they show all the different types of classes you could take, so in addition to drawing and painting, they had a baking and singing class.  The kids did the first class and drew zoo animals.  The second class Henry opted out of and the other two made a collage.  No one had any interest in singing or baking, but Josiah and Caroline really liked the animation class.  Essentially they made a flip book.  Though they enjoyed the classes they took, overall they were not very challenging for them.  However, a few days later, Todd was flipping through channels and found Bob Ross.  The kids sat enamored.  The next day, Josiah tried to paint trees à la Bob Ross.  

The kids used their creativity skills to enter a t-shirt contest for Chuy's, a Tex-Mex restaurant.  Josiah had a lot of ideas.  In one he drew John Lennon and captioned it, "Imagine...going to Chuy's."  He settled on his Rocketman design from Elton John's song.  Henry had a runaway taco and Caroline chose her staple rainbow.  She loves her rainbows.  This restaurant chain has funny t-shirts for sale at the front of the restaurant, so the winner gets their t-shirt made into an actual selling shirt.  The winner also gets some free food, which was why Todd really encouraged them to enter.

Josiah has been into Harry Potter lately.  He finished the second book this week.  We actually found him reading in his bed at 9:50 p.m. one night, which is pretty unusual.  He's working his way through book three now and already put the fourth on hold.  So, when it came time to dress up for CC this week, Josiah chose to be Harry Potter.  He walked up to Todd and I in the morning and showed us the little zig zag scar he had drawn on his forehead.  Caroline chose to be Cinderella.  She was Cinderella for the pictures at home.  She was Cinderella in the car driving to CC.  Then when we arrived at CC she stripped off the costume.  She said it was too hard to wear all day.  Henry, clever boy that he is, came downstairs and when we asked him who he was dressed as, he quipped, "a regular citizen from New York."  After getting a picture, Caroline wanted to do a funny one.  Henry walked away.  No silliness from that citizen.  

And then there was Halloween.  The day prior was not a good day of school.  It was rough in many, many ways.  So, out of anger, I had decided they didn't need to go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.  We could just do the thing we always do at the house (which they love - where they trick-or-treat upstairs and Todd and I are in separate bedrooms pretending to be different characters every time they knock on the door).  But then Halloween day came and there were many neighbor kids out and about playing all afternoon.  Our kids were out with them.  So I caved and said they could go trick-or-treating.  One of the neighbor dad's had told our kids that it would be safe.  He would walk with the kids and Todd or me.  At 7 p.m., Todd and I walked over to said neighbor's house.  There was a big group of kids that were going to go together.  The neighbor father said, "You both going?" to Todd and I and gave us a thumb's up.  So, Todd and I (and no other adults) ended up circling a (BIG LONG) block with 10 kids.  10.  I didn't even know three of them.  Two of them were wearing all black, even black coverings over their entire heads.  Two had roller blades and wanted to go super fast, cutting back and forth across the street.  Meanwhile, Josiah, a T-Rex, couldn't walk very quickly nor could a little five-year-old girl who was with us.  I quickly yelled ahead that we needed to stay as a group.  A mantra I repeated often.  Stay as a group!! Stay! As! A! Group!  It was a bit baffling to Todd and I that parents just let us walk away with their kids having never met before.  We'll be making different plans next year.  I'm not keen to do that again.    (In second picture, we tried to capture the full moon, but we didn't do a very good job of it.)

Sifting through the spoils and trading candy.

Josiah is currently on an all soft food diet.  He has lost a fifth and sixth bracket this week.  I've gone from being angry about the sheer number of lost brackets to disbelief and am questioning the strength of the orthodontist's glue.  I feel we've reached the ridiculous level of braces mishaps.  I'm not looking forward to my weekly Monday phone call to the orthodontist.  Hi.  Us again.