Halloween Weekend

I suppose I should state this up front: I am one of the few blogging writers who is not doing NaNoWriMo this year. (That's National Novel Writing Month to those of you unfamiliar with the term; the challenge is to write 50,000 words on a new project in one month.) My main focus right now is finishing Across Two Universes; once that's ready (hopefully next year will be the year!), I'd like to go back to another project I started back in 2007.

Anyway, Alex got to celebrate Halloween for three days this weekend. His daycare center had a parade Friday afternoon; I left work early to see it. As soon as Alex saw me, he clung to me so much I wound up having to carry him in the parade. He was a dinosaur:

(We wound up leaving the hat off most of the time since it flopped over into his face.)

After the parade, we stayed a bit longer and played some games at the daycare center.

Saturday was the big day. I got dressed in my own costume -- a queen -- during Alex's nap. When Eugene came home, we got Alex dressed and took him around. It was cold and windy, but we went around for about an hour. Alex wanted to be carried again; he doesn't believe in using his legs if he can make me carry him. So I had to walk around our neighborhood holding up my long dress with one hand and balancing a toddler and his bag of goodies in the other. A piece of costume jewelry broke during our trek, and we lost a little toy we got from one of our neighbors. At least I didn't fall. Alex did pretty well, saying "Trick or Treat" and "Thank you" when prompted. He did get spooked at some of the decorations people had up; the worst one was a talking Darth Vader. When we came home, he turned over his bag and kept looking at all of his candy. I think he likes looking at the wrappers almost more than he does eating the candy. Unfortunately, he does like eating it too; I thought he was going to become a strict saccharidevore when he didn't want dinner last night. Today he ate other types of food.

Today we had a party with some other local parents. It was held at a place called Little Monkey Business, which is a combination indoor playground/coffee shop. Alex brought his bag of candy with him into the playground area; he was lucky enough not to lose any, though he did wind up giving a sucker to one of the little girls. His favorite toy was a little house; we joked he was going to take out a mortgage on it. While he did fuss here and there, overall he did very well. Now it's back to the regular routine tomorrow.