Category Archives: Festivities

Jake’s Jack-o-Lantern is named Chachi!

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This is, I believe, directly correlated with the event of my brother and his girlfriend (very kindly) babysitting on Friday night, so that my husband and I could go out to dinner to celebrate his birthday. “I’m so excited!” I said to my yoga teacher Friday morning, “We have a date! We only have about five dates a year.” She smiled at me, somewhat sympathetically. Now that I think about it, five might be a slight over-estimate. Anyway, we had a lovely dinner and the boys enjoyed their uncle and aunt and now we have a Jack-o-Lantern named Chachi.

It snowed big, fat flakes Saturday morning so my plans to take the boys to a local market were quashed – I have a thing about not driving in snowstorms unless it is really necessary – so instead we decided to carve our pumpkins. Here’s me and the boys digging out the innards:


Okay, so it’s just me digging out the innards. Here are the finished products:


Chachi is the one on the left.

Later we made snowmen and I really should have taken a picture, as some sort of avant-garde photographic portrait. We decorated the snowman with random items in our backyard, and after I went inside to warm up I saw Mr. Snowman meeting his maker, as it were. Fortunately the boys were not urinating on him, no; instead they were merely kicking him down and laughing hysterically, a somewhat disturbing scenario. Soon all that was left was a pile of snow, a plastic fireman’s hat, and two water guns.

Dummy Jimmy Too Tall has a friend!

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Two friends, actually.

I wanted to write a nice, thoughtful post today but here is what is on my mind:

1) It’s my dad’s 60th birthday this weekend. I have to run out today and get a gift but he is a man and he is 60. He just doesn’t need anything. I guess it will be aftershave. Again.

2) I took Jake to Superstore yesterday to get frozen spinach and tziatiki. I ended up with two very large pumpkins, a decorative ghost and black cat, spiders and pretend webbing, and two more scarecrows, which he promptly named Idiot and TV. Anyone have a pet they need named? Because my children are gifted in that department.

3) When we bought the pumpkins, Jake suggested we make a pie. Ha! I can hardly stop laughing. Let’s just say I’m not one to make pastry and leave it at that.

4) I have to take the kids to my mother’s this afternoon. She is making their Halloween costumes and needs them to have a final fitting. The sewing gene completely skipped my generation. Once I sewed a button on my pants and somehow managed to cut a hole in the butt of them. Another time I tried the button thing and I ended up sewing the legs of the pants together and then completely tearing them when I tried to take the stitches out. I almost failed Home Economics in junior high. My best friend would sit at the sewing machine, making her actually-wearable t-shirt and shorts, and I would sit beside her, ripping out my stitches – again – until my t-shirt was a shredded disaster.

So, I’m off to get some aftershave, and not any more fall related decorations.

Fall Follies

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So our September summer now appears to be emphatically over, so it’s time for me to put away those t-shirts and bring out my vast array of black, grey, and charcoal sweaters. Yes, I did make a distinction between grey and charcoal.

I’m not a huge fan of fall, perhaps because it begins and ends very suddenly here and then all we are left with is a long, long winter. If I lived in a more temperate climate, perhaps I would feel differently. One thing I do like about fall – other than pretty leaves and back-to-school – is preparing for holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween, and that is in spite of the fact that I have a horror of Thanksgiving dinners. I have never liked meals that involve turkeys, or any meat that is so graphically displayed. Shudder. I realize that I’m in the vast minority with these feelings, mind you, so I really do understand if Thanksgiving is the highlight of your year – it’s just not my personal cup of tea.

Anyway, there really aren’t any good decorating holidays in the summer, so it’s kind of fun to break out the cool decorations for Thanksgiving and Halloween. My kids are now at the age where they are pretty excited to see severed arms, chainsaws, and whatnot in Wal-Mart, so I’m sure we will at some point end up with those festive arrangements on my front lawn. Here’s what we have so far:

That’s Jake’s Frankenstein monster, dancing in the (cold, cold) wind. I more or less told him the story of the Frankenstein monster, censoring it appropriately, of course. What has bedeviled him are the staples on the monster’s face. “Wouldn’t that hurt so much?” he asked. Uh, yeah, probably.

This is Mark’s Dracula. Nothing says Happy Halloween like a blood-thirsty vampire!


This fellow was named Dummy Jimmy Too Tall. My kids are awesome at naming things! This guy is about five feet tall, and scares the hell out of my dog.

Isn’t he cute? The scarecrow is in the front yard, which means the dog only sees it when we are going for a walk. The first couple of times he saw it he cried, whimpered, barked, and tried to run away – all at the same time. I laughingly told my husband about this, but Mark, overhearing, welled up and wanted to take the scarecrow back to the store so he wouldn’t frighten Barkley anymore. Aw. I told him Barkley would get used to it and he has, mostly just eying Dummy Jimmy warily as we walk by. You never know about those scarecrows! Sssspppooookkkkyyy.