Halloween 2008

I had forgotten to post about our wonderful Halloween night! Tucker had a blast. He was Jango Fett, and Connor was the cutest Superman I have ever seen. I had intended on taking Connor with us in the stroller, however our neighbor/Tucker's friend Gunter, showed up in a super scary costume and my hopes of Connor having a fun night in the dark were diminished. See photo of scary costume above, and Connor's face. Tucker even ducked away from him. The kids is 8 by the way.... The sadder part was Tucker's best buddy in his older sister's tiger costume, complete with head band. What was his mom thinking???? The answer, she wasn't. Bless his heart. He is our neighbor, Jake, the one I wrote about in the first post on my blog. Jake and his sister are sweet kids, and he and Tucker are really good playmates. They have played together ever since we moved into our house when Tucker was two years old and Jake was three.

Anyway, Jake's parents let him trick or treat with Tucker and I while Brad stayed in the house with Connor giving out the treats. As I posted previously, our neighborhood puts on a good halloween show. It took us about two hours to get around to all of the houses. I had explained to Tucker and Jake when we set out for the evening that the universal symbol for "We have candy" was a lit porch light. My explanation proved me wrong a couple of times, but they loaded up on the sweets regardless of the people who chose not to give the neighborhood a sugar high.

There are two houses on the culdesac behing our house that go all out for halloween. Every year, they seem to get a little bit more insane with the decorations. The first year, they had the older son hidden in the bushes throwing pop rocks that would send the kids screaming back into the street. Tucker did not want to go near the house the next year due to the pop rocks and the mummy that suddenly grabbed his shoulder as he walked up the sidewalk to get his candy. This year, he and Jake could not wait to get to the haunted houses. It was an amazing set up. Both houses had music from Halloween and other horror movies playing, dry ice with blue lights behind them and a graveyard set up complete with a half buried skeleton. It was very cool, to me anyway. Tucker, once again, chose not to go near it. His imagination is a lot like mine was when I was little, in that he can't seem to separate fact from fiction, or reality from make believe. He saw the skeleton coming out of the ground as a real one, and was immediatly thinking about how it got there, and who it might have been. All scary things if you really think about it. His mind travels to deep places every now and then, and makes me want to keep him from thinking all together. Tucker is a lot like me, in some ways, his imagination, sensitive nature, and empathy. He is more like his father though in his quest for perfectionism, OCD behaviors, and the train of thought that everything in this world is either one way or another, and nothing in between could possibly exist. The last statement contrasts greatly with his imagination, but I believe that part of his little mind is separate from his nature, and will hopefully keep him from being a boring person later in life.

Like all neighborhoods, we had some big kids trick or treating, running through the streets in their scary costumes, wreaking havoc on front porches every where and making a lot of noise for attention as they go. Jake informed me that one of these "big kids" called him Chicken Little because of his glasses. This infuriated me, because having being picked on at one time in elementary school, I loath a bully. I told Jake that the next time this kid called him Chicken Little, to call him Pizza face. Jake thought that was hilarious but did not understand the meaning of the phrase, and I let him believe that it was just a funny thing to say. I knew very well that this comment would hit home to a 14 year old boy who was going through puberty, and desparately applying his Sea Breeze and zit cream on a nightly basis to cover up his pepporoni sized pimples. Sure enough, as we came to one of our last houses on our block, the big kids came around and one of them said, "Hey its Chicken Little." Jake turned around and said, "Shut up Pizza head! " The kid stopped in his tracks and looked at his buddy's and said, "Did you hear what he called me? " They all said yeah, and started calling him pizza head right back. Jake looked over at me in his tiger headband and grinned through painted on whiskers with a look of triumph. If anything, the little guy in his sister's hand me down costume had shown an older kid that he didn't appreciate having a nick name made for him, and that he was capable of coming up with a nick name too, even if it was a little altered from the original name itself.

Jake came back to our house to wait on his sister, parents and baby brother to finish trick or treating and had a hot dog with Tucker. They stuffed themselves with Oscar Meyer's and Hershey's, both of them exhausted and happy. It was one of my favorite Halloween's ever.