It snowed today!  The little dusting is, I believe, positively correlated with the comment I made yesterday regarding the unbelievable fact that we had made it through September AND October with no snow.  But, dear readers, we had NOT made it through October, and so now we have snow.  It’s not much though and it is mostly melted, but I feel silly for having mentioned it. 

I also feel a bit silly for having thought – although not spoken aloud – that we have eluded illness quite successfully so far this school year.  Mark now has a very, very minor version of the sniffles which has the unfortunate yet usual side effect of THE COUGH.  This means that he is waking up to cough in the night, which gives me post-traumatic flashbacks to his bout with pneumonia and the subsequent months of nighttime coughing.  I gave him a shot of his steriod inhaler this morning and he responded by saying “Wow, my chest feels all crazy!” which led me down a spiral of worry.  But he seems fine.

He really was just fine until the morning after the Halloween Family Dance, which is, quite honestly, the highlight of his calendar year, right after Christmas.  And it was a fabulous time for all of us, although I’m happy that it’s all done.  I cleared my calendar last Thursday specifically to make these:

Ninety sugar cookies!  They are almost completely devoid of nutritional value, yet are a consistent crowd pleaser.  I was taking three dozen of them for the bake sale/ concession at the dance and was pleased to see that they sold out fairly quickly. 

Nothing sells like a choice of spooky shapes and lots of sprinkles.

The dance itself was so much fun, augmented by a flash mob performance from a local studio – teenage girls dressed as zombies, dancing to Thriller.  My kids were dressed in their finest spooky wear:

A vampire and Spider Monkey from Ben 10!  My husband and I are in the background, and we are also dressed up, although my neighbour did not realize it.  I walked over to the school early to help set up, and as I left the house with my makeup gun set to “whore” I fervently hoped I would not run into anyone I knew.  No sooner than I had thought that, my neighbour got out of his truck and started talking to me in a casual, awkward, elephant-in-the-room way.  I mentioned I was on my way to set up for the school Halloween Dance, and he said “Oh!  Halloween!  I thought you were just going out with some girlfriends!”  That was a little disheartening.

For the record, I do not look like this when I go out with my girlfriends.

Near the end of the dance, the DJ was inspired to play a number of “oldies” for the parents’ listening pleasure.  I was a little wary – after all, this was only days after the soul train – but the very last song was Don’t Stop Believing by Journey, which is pretty awesome, if you ask me.  I was belting out Hold on to that FEEEELLLLININNNNGGG for the next couple of days.

There was even – hold on to your hats! – much Grade Six Girl Drama, complete with mediation (“She’s upset because you said you didn’t want to dance?  But then she saw you dancing with Sophie?”) and crying in the bathroom.  A few years ago my niece was at a school dance and my sister-in-law asked her how many girls were crying in the bathroom and my niece was completely flabbergasted.  How did you know girls were crying in the bathroom?  Because girls have always and will always be crying in the bathroom at dances until the end of time.

There is something very comforting in that.  When my children are chaperoning their own children’s dances, and Party Rockers in the House Tonight is the golden oldie played for the parents, girls will still be huddled in a group in the bathroom, surrounding and comforting one of their sobbing compatriots.