Ave Caesar!

Oh. My. God. I had no idea how fun this would be. Wow.

More tomorrow — somebody is exhausted from climbing an awful lot of porch steps (this is Vancouver; you climb an entire flight of stairs to get to the front door), and all patience is GONE. But boy was it fun!

Happy Halloween!

You’re happy it’s finally here so that I’ll just shut up already! It’s my favorite holiday! Learn to live with it! There may be pictures later, there may not. There will almost certainly be that nasty feeling of having eaten too much candy!

Here are some highlights of the season so far:

Evil: Being awakened by Byron at 6:30 (thank you, time change!). He is, of course, jumping on his bed like the Energizer Bunny on speed.
Good: Letting him crawl into our bed for snuggle time (even if his feet are icy death feet of doom!).
Scary: The way he leaps up and says, “Wear costume! Get candy!” when we tell him it’s Halloween. The brainwashing has been horribly effective!

Stupid: The movie Poltergeist, which I was never allowed to see in the 80s, when I might have found it scary. I watched it the other night, thinking “ooh! I always wished my mom would let me see this!” Duh-huhhhhhr. Man, they had a weird notion of “scary” in the 80s…
Good: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which we watched last night while decorating Halloween cookies. Well, okay, Keanu Reeves’s British accent was evil (and when will I stop appending the word “dude” to everything he says? You’d think the Matrix movies would have cured me of that…), and I kept seeing Mr. Burns instead of Dracula in the early scenes, but I still enjoyed it.
Scary: How many times Scott and I have seen The Mummy. And no, not the original classic — the remake with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. In fact, if there’s any movie that can legitimately be called “our” movie? Yeah. That’s it.

Good: Halloween cookies!
Evil: How much goddamn work it is to make the kind we like. My family used to make sugar cookies at Christmas and decorate them with frosting and candy (VERY elaborately, I might add!), and Scott and I have adapted this practice to Halloween. Except we don’t have any Halloween cookie cutters so we end up shaping the devils, dinosaurs, and sarcophagi by hand. And there aren’t five of us, so we end up very sick of decorating by the end.
Scary: How quickly B has figured out where they are and that he wants some.

Guess what’s in the forecast for Halloween!

No really! Guess!

Heavy rainfall warning! Wind warning! What is this, Vancouver?!?

He happily wore his costume for an hour this afternoon. My Dad had sent us a giant furry football for Halloween, and Byron was running around with it like some kind of Roman linebacker. B even agreed to wear the (**gasp!**) helmet for a few minutes, which made me realize it won’t stay on by itself. Joy. A chin strap would help, but if it’s pouring rain tomorrow I don’t think anything’s going to help a papier mache helmet.

Yes, we got a picture, but his arm is in front of his face and I look stoned, so I’m hoping we can get another, better one later.

It’s cold. We’ve got the fireplace on. That makes me extra nervous! Time to scoot!

Cape practice

We’re practicing wearing the costume. 2 minutes the first night, 5 last night, and then tonight he was willing to play “chase” with Daddy:

And here’s the front, which will evenutally sport a SPQR medallion over the bit of writing on the right:

He’s very Prince Valiant, no?

He trick-or-treats for pickles in the kitchen. Never underestimate the power of a pickle.

Slow Friday

* We had Byron’s friend Anton (and Anton’s mama) over to play this morning. Byron had not been very understanding about other kids playing with his toys the last few times we had people over, but today he did all right. There was just one railroad-bridge-throwing incident and a couple shrieks (which indicated a snack deficit that was easily corrected).

Otherwise, the morning was filled with “That’s Anton! I see Anton! Anton playing with the garbage truck!” That, plus carrot muffins, made for a pretty nice playdate.

* Byron is getting pretty good at laying down railroad track for his Thomas trains, and he’s becoming a whiz at building with his Mega-Blocks. He likes to build CRANES with the latter. They’re not that tall, but he’s got the idea of the long boom arm down. This morning’s crane had two arms, and so B announced: “I got two cranes!”

Scott and I got all excited that he understood a NUMBER correctly (he identifies numerals, but doesn’t usually relate it to a number of objects) — anyway, B caught on to our excitement about the number and decided that if two cranes were exciting, then more would be even MORE exciting. Without building more cranes, he started inflating his estimate: “Three! Four! FIVE cranes!”

* He’s curled up under the laundry basket now, pretending to be a turtle.

A turtle with a dirty diaper, unless my nose deceives me.

Around the world in a cute balloon

So we were looking at his special World Map placemat that GramPat and GramMike gave him, and I was pointing out the highlights: Canada, Vancouver, Japan, India, the US.

Byron: [pointing at Africa] What’s that? What’s THAT?
Me: That’s Africa! And look, here’s Mexico!
Byron: Ooooooooh, Mexico! [that’s a James Taylor song he likes]
Me: And here’s Ancient Greece! And Ancient Rome!
Byron: Where do BELUGAS live?
Me: [melt!]

Happy GAM-o-ween, weenies!

This week at GirlAMatic (which gets abbreviated to “GAM”, in case you’re confused) we’re celebrating Halloween by doing pin-ups of each other’s characters! The one I drew is up today at Andre Richard’s “Jeepers”. Tomorrow “Return of the Mad Bun” will feature a mighty high-larious one by Lea Hernandez (of “Ironclad Petal”).

Got all that? Good! Anyway, enjoy them all — there’s a whole mess of funny ones coming in, and we’re not even halfway through yet!

Did I say “funny”? I meant spooky! SPOOOOOOOKY!

Before Byron destroys it:

Here it is, in all its shiny glory! It’s so beautiful, I may not let him wear it!

Oh, and: Congratulations White Sox, and all my Chicago friends! I can’t actually say I’m sorry to see the Astros obliterated in such fashion…

It’s not easy being TWO

We came this close to selling the boy to the gypsies last night. If a gypsy telemarketer had called us up at about 8pm, asking, “Any pickup this week?” we would have said, “He’ll be out on the curb at dawn!” Fortunately for B, nobody called, and if you look in the phone book under “slave traders”, there’s NOTHING, and we are just too lazy to look much further than that.

He screamed all evening, slept soundly all night, and then picked up where he left off this morning. He threw an entire bowl of cereal onto the floor, kicked each of his parents, and screamed so loudly I thought the sliding glass door was in for it.

(The folks upstairs sometimes play their TV louder than I’d like, later than I’d like. I will never, ever complain to them. They’ve more than earned their petty, passive-aggressive revenge. They must think we’re boiling him alive.)

Tylenol, administered at about 9am, seems to have finally turned it around. I swear he’s teething — he’s got his hand in his mouth up to the elbow all the time, and the drool! It pools! How long does it take those damned two-year molars to break through?!?

Anyway, he walked all the way to Safeway and back, held my hand the entire time at Safeway, ate his lunch without incident, and spent the last half hour with me, sitting quietly and listening to audio clips of orchestral instruments online (inspired by the book Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin — he was walking around the apartment shouting “Trombone!” so I thought he should hear what one sounded like).

Despite what I wrote yesterday, he is violently opposed to every aspect of his Halloween costume except the sword. He may go as “Recalcitrant Toddler with Sword”. My friend Lisa suggested “Highlander”. Maybe a screaming Diz-Buster? The Harvester of Eyes?

I will display the beautiful helmet up on the mantelpiece with the Olympians, if he won’t wear it, and will consider it the finest decorative object I have ever produced.

The power of positive propaganda

* After weeks of standing next to the door mewling, “Let’s go home!” at dance class, Byron finally let go (of the doornob) and got funky today.

And by “got funky” I mean “spent most of class cheerfully running laps of the room, occasionally did the gestures, and TOTALLY marched when she played The Ants Go Marching.” But you probably knew that.

He has never even attempted the gestures, previously, but to day he did a lot of them, just at the wrong times. If we were doing If You’re Happy and You Know It, for example (which is not one of the songs she does, but it’s one you presumably know), then he would be clapping his hands while the rest of us were stamping our feet, and stamping his feet only after the song had ended. But he was trying, and furthermore, he was smiling, and so it was the best dance class ever.

* The Halloween costume proceeds apace. All that’s left to do is the fringe of the (inauthentic Corinthian) crest, a few SPQR medallions for his chest, and some sort of belt (no energy left to make a proper cingulum…).

My sewing machine decided to misbehave with me, so I ended up hemming his cape by hand the other night when I had DEMON INSOMNIA. I tried the cape on him yesterday and he howled “GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”

The plan is to spend from now ’til Halloween talking it up. Man, you sure are lucky to have such a great cape! I can’t wait until Halloween, when you get to wear your cape! Think that sounds futile? Think again.

That’s how I got him to finally like dance class. I’ve been telling him how fun it would be for the last two days.