Happy Halloween

Briefly, I'll acknowledge how sporadic my blogging has been over the past few months. I have an infant at home now. What do you want?
If you follow this blog with enough regularity that you feel personally affronted by my inconsistency, (a) I'm flattered, and (b) you need a hobby.

Fall is a fantastic time of year. I think you really have to be an adult to fully appreciate it. As a kid, fall just means school started back really recently, and you are as far away from summer vacation as it is possible to be. As an adult, you get the schadenfreude of watching kids go off to school, while enjoying (mercifully) cooler weather, college football, pumpkin flavored everything, and the approaching food and booze filled holiday season.

This Halloween is our first as a family of three. We are spending it quietly sitting at home, watching reruns of Warehouse 13 on Netflix, while our daughter compliantly snoozes in a pack-n-play and the lights on the front porch remain definitively off - the universal bah-humbug to trick-or-treaters everywhere. See above about the snoozing baby if you are wondering why we are so decidedly unwelcoming. We did not even do a jack-o-lantern. We carved out a pumpkin with visiting family a few weeks ago, and even baked the pumpkin seeds and made a pumpkin pie with the innards. But we found out the hard way that if you carve out a pumpkin, but don't carve a face into it to let the inside dry out a bit, it tends to do something I can only describe as "putrifying" within a relatively short time.

Personally, I've always been of the mind that holidays are a state of mind and should be dragged out and enjoyed as long as possible. I'm kind of halloweened out at this point. I realize Olivia won't remember any of this October, but we took full advantage of her first Halloween to do every kitschy family oriented outing we could think of. We attended Boo at the Zoo, where hundreds of barely controlled post-toddlers rage around animal exhibits in pursuit of sugar while displaying their parents' taste in costuming (or lack thereof). We saw a lot of fellow geeks in the crowd, mostly in Star Wars paraphernalia. We went with a group of friends to a corn maze, where the corn barely came to our shoulder and the group was lead unwaveringly through the maze by someone who practically had the layout memorized. It required no active thought on my part, but we still had fun, despite not getting lost for countless hours with a two month old. We went to a friend's Halloween themed birthday party where Olivia survived her first zombie attack. And, in a sign of the holiday creep infecting even my cynical self, the weekend of Halloween saw us hosting a few friends for a pre-Thanksgiving feast. Yes, that's right. Thanksgiving in October. We had to try out some tweaked recipes thanks to Olivia's dietary restrictions, and I daresay our friends made willing guinea pigs.

I look forward to taking my daughter trick-or-treating and all that Halloween necessarily means to a walking, talking kid, but I enjoyed this October just the way it was. Hope you did as well.

Now I'm going to return to shunning Trick-or-Treaters. Happy Halloween.