It’s the week following Halloween and, frankly, I’m glad it’s over.
Don’t get me wrong—I love Halloween. It holds strong as my top non-federal holiday, and fall is easily my favorite season. However, in this household, we’ve been discussing Halloween in some capacity since the very first leaf hit the bricks. It was used as a contextual landmark for Theo’s October birthday. It was factored into my choices at the PTA plant sale. I heard "Pumpkin Bones" being rehearsed en masse as the kids filed out of school. And, of course, there were the endless questions about Booing.
Ah, sigh. Booing. More on that circus later.
When it comes to the lifespan of any holiday, I like to enjoy it in equal measure to the effort that goes into it. Generally speaking, I prefer to stay ahead of the game, so I started asking the kids what they wanted to be around the same time stores began marketing for Spooky Season—which is to say, way too early. I didn't want a repeat of past years, where I procrastinated, waited too long to pull the trigger, and was left at the mercy of Prime shipping or the barren wasteland of picked-over party store shelves. Last year, I ended up in an ice cream cone hat and a pink chiffon skirt, hot-gluing colorful felt strips onto my torso and calling myself "melted ice cream." Procrastination is a sneaky frenemy of mine. Whenever I take the bait, I end up paying the price for ill-fitting, cheap polyester with several frantic runs to local stores, many dollars in gas, and an emergency supply of safety pins and hem tape just to salvage my mistakes.
This year’s costume selection ran the absolute gamut: Theo was a fireman, Ethan a racecar driver, and Cole the Grim Reaper. Mark went as the creep from Squid Game and 3D-printed both his and Cole’s masks. The printer was originally a gift for Cole’s eighth birthday, but it's a purchase I’ve become increasingly obsessed with as time goes on. Between the masks, my berry strainer, glow-in-the-dark wall decorations, and custom boat fixtures, the list goes on—this thing has officially paid for itself. (Bambu, if you happen to stumble upon this blog and want to sponsor me, I’d be happy to discuss terms. But I digress.)
Speaking of savings, each kid’s costume usually runs me at least $40 to $50 a pop. This year, though, Theo was gifted his fireman uniform for his birthday. (His entire room is fire-station themed—firetruck bed, firetruck comforter; my mother-in-law even handed down a retired crocheted wall hanging and Engine Company emblem from my father-in-law’s days as a volunteer firefighter). Cole’s costume was cobbled together from an old cloak in our Halloween bin paired with his 3D-printed mask. The only items I actually bought were his scythe, Ethan’s $22 racecar suit, and a skirt for my witch costume.
Well... let me back up. I did save on costumes this year, but I more than made up for those savings in the sheer volume of cheap plastic crap I had to buy for Booing.
If you’re unfamiliar, the easiest way to describe Booing is that it’s essentially corporate-sponsored ding-dong-ditching—except you leave a bag of trinkets to compensate the homeowner for the inconvenience of having to answer their door between 6:00 and 9:00 PM. It starts in elementary school, or even earlier if your littles have older siblings. The younger ones catch on, demand to participate, and before you know it, you’re trapped in a car with three tiny civil nuisances and 60 cellophane bags of junk, dropping them onto strangers' doorsteps under cover of darkness.
The added hazards of fences, locked gates, and barking dogs only heighten the adrenaline rush. At one point, my six-year-old genuinely instructed me to scale a fence when I couldn’t figure out how to unlatch his friend’s gate. That was only four houses into a 30-plus-house route, so for the bulk of the excursion, I was just praying we didn't end up on the nightly news.
With my oldest now in third grade, we’ve become well-acquainted with both the giving and receiving end of the Boo, as well as the collateral damage involved. You can expect:
A massive influx of extra sugar well in advance of the most sugar-centric holiday of the year.
An absurd quantity of plastic trinkets strewn across your floor like landmines.
Slime and sticky stretch-skulls adhering to your walls.
A few surprisingly industrial-grade temporary tattoos that your child will insist on applying exactly five minutes after you were already supposed to be at school drop-off.
In any event, Booing is fun for the kids. It’s a little extra chaos, sure, but it’s not like I’m at home hand-sewing their costumes from scratch. Not like my mom did.
I distinctly remember trips to Jo-Ann Fabrics—picking out patterns and bolt after bolt of material—and my mom hunched over her sewing machine in the middle of the dining room during any spare moment she had (which were few and far between). She worked full-time as a Registered Nurse, but sewing wasn't just a passion for her; it was a genuine gift. The costumes she made were light-years superior in quality and detail to anything you’ll find on Amazon or the shelves of Party City.
She made them every single year for as long as I can remember: poodle skirts, a troll, Princess Jasmine, the Little Mermaid, a wizard. The wizard costume was one for the history books—a long, deep-velvet cloak detailed with silver stitching that was as comfortable as it was breathtaking. Over the years, we’d dip into our family trove of costumes for various school functions, until one day, the wizard cloak went to school and never returned. My mom still gets worked up when she thinks about it, and rightly so. I got my undies in a twist when Theo broke Cole’s $20 scythe thirty minutes into trick-or-treating, so I can’t imagine the heartache of losing a hand-crafted, expensive, blood-sweat-and-literal-tear-stained garment to the elementary school void.
While I’ve tried my hand at sewing and managed to quilt a bit, I can fully admit I do not possess the skill level—or the patience—to craft a costume from scratch. Furthermore, believe it or not, I simply do not have the time.
True, I don’t have a conventional full-time job right now, but you’d be amazed at how fast a day of "not working" evaporates. After morning drop-off, I come home to clean up after the breakfast rush: gathering plates, cups, and cutlery, wiping down counters, and vacuuming up an absurd volume of crumbs that seem to have been violently sprayed from my children's mouths. Then I gather a mountain of laundry, throw in a load, empty the dryer, fold the previous load, and put it away. I tidy the upstairs rooms, come back down, and face my actual to-do list.
There are always errands to run, paperwork to fill out, bills to pay, emails to answer, phone calls to make, and a crock-pot to prep for dinner. On top of the daily grind, there’s usually some home maintenance issue crying out for attention. Whether it's repairing window screens, scrubbing mysterious couch stains, carpet-cleaning spilled Gatorade out of the rug, or replacing door weather-stripping, you can bet your bottom dollar I’m spending a solid couple of hours on it.
And those are just the minor projects. In the winter, we torture ourselves with heavy-lifting endeavors like building custom den shelving or tackling Phase XIV of the basement finish. In the fall, the biggest constraint on my time is completely self-inflicted: everything I sign up for through the PTA. Between running the fall plant sale, playing Secret Reader, and handling class parent duties, my calendar is packed. Add in the month of October specifically, where I’m scrambling to source outfits for theme weeks like Spirit Week and Red Ribbon Week, and free time completely vanishes. Honestly, I’ve only recently started prioritizing this blog so I don’t end up booking myself a one-way stay at Bellevue.
I truly don’t know how our parents did it: working full-time, guiding us through school, showing up for sports, and still finding the bandwidth for the extras. Now that I’m in the thick of parenting, I marvel at what mine were able to pull off, put up with, and sacrifice so we could have the childhood we did. (And they managed to do it all without accidentally abandoning us in a grocery store or losing their minds along the way!) With all three of their daughters now fully grown, intact, and living in their own homes, I like to think my parents occasionally kick back, clink glasses, and pat each other on the back for everything they achieved as people and as parents.
When you’re deep in the weeds, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whether you’re knee-deep in potty training and praying for just one day without an accident, trying to decipher "New Math" so you can help your third-grader with homework, or racing the clock trying to hand-stitch a costume—I see you. I am you. And I have faith that we’ll make it to the other side. We might be a little beat-up and worse for wear, but we’ll make it nonetheless.
One day, I hope to kick back, high-five my husband, and laugh at the long nights, the mishaps, and the beautiful chaos that comes with raising little humans. Frankly, I think we’re going to miss these days. As stressful and exhausting as they are, they’re the very things shaping us—and our kids—into better people.
It will be bittersweet, because by the time we reach that light, our children will be grown, perhaps having babies of their own and starting this whole glorious, exhausting cycle all over again. Some people say your kids won't need you anymore at that point if you’ve done your job right, but I disagree.
I still need my parents. I need them to remind me, "It’s just a phase," or "You girls fought just like that, and look at you now—best friends!" I need them to offer perspective and lighten the heavy moments so they don't feel quite so crushing. I need them to reassure me that it's all worth it, and that it doesn't matter if the birthday cake came from a box or from scratch, as long as it was baked with love.
So as I pack away the skeletons and plastic gravestones, toss out the soggy pumpkins, and sweep up the leaves tracked across the floor, I’m finally able to digest the past month of festivities (along with all the stolen Halloween candy). Despite the inevitable sugar crashes and the daylight saving time disruption, we had a fantastic time together. From the night-ops Booing to trick-or-treating alongside family and friends, we laughed a lot—and even managed to catch a few genuine smiles on camera.
And honestly? That’s more than enough.
I take comfort in knowing that whatever I lack in traditional domestic mastery, I more than make up for in my ability to nimbly execute a ding-dong-ditch and successfully evade breaking-and-entering charges. And that’s got to count for something.
