2 skeletons and the Lion that ate their flesh

Happy Halloween!

Okay, I admit it, I could not possibly be any less excited about Halloween this year. The only reason I even put the kids into their costumes is that Andy made me. True story. The problem is two fold. First, I am sick, and the kids are sick, and we are all pretty miserable, but more on that later. Second, now that Christmas effectively starts before Halloween (what with all the shopping, and budgeting, and generally stressing out) I find it hard to focus on Halloween at all. Add to that the fact that the kids don't do anything in school for Halloween, we missed the MOMS club Halloween parade (for the first time since Fraser was a baby!), we got 20+ inches of snow Saturday night and I have apparently just recently crossed that invisible line between childhood, when you think "Woohoo! Play dress up and get free candy! Halloween ROCKS!" to adulthood, when I think "This is such crap. Not only do I have to come up for costumes for my kids which no one will even see under their winter parkas and which they completely don't give a crap about, but I have to go out and spend money to give candy to a bunch of kids I don't know who barely bother to dress up at all and who DON'T say thank you." And what is my reward? I have to slog through the snow with my ungrateful spawn who will whine the entire time that they are cold so we can go to 5 houses and then come home with a bunch of candy that I am not allowed to eat. This holiday officially sucks.



Hammie, Fraser and Andy's car

It is true that I might not be quite so much the Scrooge McDuck of Halloween if I were healthy, or the kids were healthy, but I'm not so sure. I have had this really truly nasty cough for about 2 weeks now, but I am still refusing to go to the doctor, for reasons I can't fully explain but which are driving my husband crazy. The problem is that aside from the cold and feeling tired (which I feel pretty much all the time anyway) I don't really feel badly, so going to the doctor seems excessive. Unfortunately Eleanor doesn't feel the same way about her cold and she was up literally all night Saturday night, and I was up with her alternately rocking her in the glider or trying to sleep sitting up with her on the couch. Needless to say neither of us got much sleep, and neither of us was exactly the poster child for pleasant temperaments in the face of sleep deprivation on Sunday. Luckily the boys had a snow day today since their school is currently without power, so we have had somewhat of a chance to recover, and yet my Halloween enthusiasm has not been restored.



Eleanor and the snowliage

In all fairness to Halloween, I have been very distracted lately and have had trouble focusing on just about everything. I am still struggling with whether to send Fraser to the public school for Kindergarten next year or keep him at the Village School. I love the focus the Village School has on educating the whole child. They do a lot with music and art and go outside every single day, more than once a day in K through 6th grades. I think for Fraser that would be a real incentive to stay enthusiastic about school. On the other hand, the school is 1/2 an hour away, which means Eleanor and I are often spending 2 hours a day in the car. If Eleanor and Hammie are in preschool and Fraser is in the Kindergarten, I can drop them all off together but then I have to pick Eleanor and Hammie up at 11:30 and Fraser up at 3:15. If I went back and forth each time that would be 3 hours in the car. There is nothing (and I do mean nothing) anywhere near the school, so killing time while they are in school is challenging, and no one from our town, or near our town, is currently enrolled in the school. It's possible someone from Ashburnham might be enrolled next year with whom we could carpool, but not likely. I am not thrilled about the idea of spending the money to send the kids to private school, and the public school isn't bad, it just isn't wonderful either. This weighing of pros and cons, going back and forth and back again, occupies a HUGE amount of my mental energy lately and has started to really piss me off and put me in a bad mood just because it is so annoying not to be able to make what should be a very simple decision.

This annoys me more than it really should because I view it as confirmation of my growing suspicion that motherhood is destroying my brain. At dinner the other night Fraser asked me if I would go back to work. I said "I'm working right now." He said "Yeah but when we grow up and get married and move out, Will you go back to the job you had before?" And I said "No" and changed the subject.  The truth is I can't imagine going back to being a lawyer because I can't imagine my brain working efficiently enough to be a good lawyer ever again. It's really pretty terrifying, but when you end most arguments with "Because I'm your mother and I said so and that should be good enough!" it's hard to imagine trying to win arguments with intelligent adults, or any adults for that matter.

But I guess it is only fitting on this most spooky of all "holidays" to focus on the things that most terrify us in life, like have your brain slowly sucked out your ears by your offspring, or having your mother eat all your Halloween candy after you've have gone to bed as payback (MUH Ha Ha ha ha ha...).