Man, between fear of layoffs and actual funerals, it’s been a bit serious around here, no?
Time to introduce some levity. In advance of Halloween, we read It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown a million times. In fact, I’ve already blogged about that. With Simon, it can be hard to tell how much he understands sometimes. Did he really GET the story?
Well, he must have at least a little bit. In the first place, he kept pointing out pumpkins wherever he saw them. Or, as he insisted to my mom, “GREAT pumpkins.” How cute is that?
And then, while we went trick-or-treating in my mom’s neighborhood, we heard him say this out loud as he approached a house:
“I need more candy for my brother.”
That would be Linus, the one who skipped trick-or-treating to make “his annual fool of himself” (sister Lucy’s words) in the pumpkin patch. This also explains why Simon kept saying he wanted to go as a witch for Halloween. Clearly, he has self-identified with Lucy. We’d love to dress him as Lucy dressed as a witch next year, but that might be a bit meta for the occasion. Still, I’m not ruling it out.
The other high point was during the KIP Halloween parade. Last year, Simon started off OK, then saw me and fell apart. I ended up marching the parade with him to salvage things. This year Simon strutted out with confidence, was completely unphased when he saw me, Matt, and his grandparents, and even stopped to pose for photos. More accurately, he stopped to ham it up for the cameras. It was his red-carpet moment!
Finally, the third giant giggle of the weekend also came when I took Simon out trick-or-treating. We walked up to a house around the corner and a few houses down from my mom’s, whereupon the woman who answered it looked at me, leaned in for a closer look, and said:
“Did you grow up in this neighborhood?”
The minute I said “yes”, she knew exactly who I was. I probably last saw her when I last went trick-or-treating myself. Which is to say, a quarter of a century ago at the minimum!