a nod to October

November 01, 2014

a nod to October

I tried my best to slam on the brakes and drag my heels through every. single. pumpkin lovin minute of October. One day it occurred to me that I’d successfully cruised through September and barely remembered a thing. Except the paint. I do remember painting the garage at 8 PM. And the ten million trips we made to the hardware store. I remember all those.

Once the October winds started dumping leaves on trampoline and we were waking up to frosty windows, I was well over the house. So over it. We filled up the rest of the month with all of things that make it my favorite.

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Pumpkin Patch. Around here that term means “gourds on pallets”. These southern kids have never seen an actual pumpkin growing on a vine so they don’t know what they’re missing. There are hay bales, though, so you are redeemed Alabama.

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The Fair. Oh how I wait with in anticipation for it to arrive every October. Possibly our favorite night of the year. While the kids stuff themselves with fried snickers bars and have impromptu dance parties in front of the farris wheel, I always take a step back and make a mental list of how they’ve changed. Last year we couldn’t convince Jonathan to go on many of the rides, this year he rode every puke inducing monstrosity his height would allow. My wild child.

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Pumpkin Patch, take 2. This time with all the other third graders at the elementary school. These pumpkins are trucked in from Illinois and spread around the field so it ‘looks’ like they grew here. The field next door was growing one of Alabama’s more successful crops.

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Trick-or-treating. Jackson said this was the best year so far, and I grudgingly agree. Candy Day (because I refuse to call it Halloween) is historically my least favorite. Of everything. But it’s growing on me. Helps when the kids are able to stay out late without having meltdowns on the sidewalk. Helps that the gracious peeps in Burger King allowed us to park in their lot for three hours without calling a tow truck. Helps that Harry Potter and Hedwig got stopped by random people on the street who wanted to take a picture with them. Which totally made up for all the hours spent cutting out hundreds of felt feathers.

The kids get harder to please every year. I remember when we could whip up a Jack Sparrow wig out of yarn and broken shells. Now they’re all “Mom. Hedwig does NOT have blue feathers.”