Happy Halloween!

We’ll actually have Trick-or-Treat on October 31st this year, miracle of miracles. I could wish for a nicer night; it’s gray and dark and freezing out there. Still both boys have costumes that are amenable to layering underneath, so it’ll be okay.

Gabe’s birthday party last night went very well. We had it at a pottery-painting place, and each kid got to paint a little figurine. Then there was cake, which was a very pleasant surprise. I mean, here’s how the talk went with the bakery lady:

“I want zombies crawling out of the cake!” [ME: "Honey, I don't think they can do that."] “Okay, ghosts and tombstones. And a yellow cake, with white frosting, and blue! And yellow! And orange and green, and no chocolate, and Halloween on it, but not too scary!”

Give that woman a raise. (Other pictures at Flickr; click that photo to get there.) And it was just the right size cake, with no leftovers! (This was a fairly important point to me, in my current state of “Let go of the taper weight-gain.” ) Actually most of the kids ate only about half their piece; it was a very rich frosting, and what they did eat was more than enough to turn the end of the party into a wild sort of affair!

I’m going to finish drinking this coffee and try to warm myself up a bunch before we trudge out into the wind tonight. Hopefully, it won’t be too scary out there for Gabe – but, then, sometimes it’s worth it. The other night, we were tickling him and roughhousing, and he squealed, “Stop! I’m a-feared!”