Sandra Tayler

After the chaos of Halloween I was looking forward to a week of calm before undertaking the new challenge of caring for a baby 4 hours per day. Instead I’m spending this week preparing for a weekend jaunt to Boise. I’m happy to be going, I’ll get to see family especially my sister’s new baby, but I won’t get the week of calm that I hoped for. The kids are all excited. They love their cousins and relish any chance they get to be together. Now all I’ve got to do is laundry, and clean the floors, and clean out the car, and load dishes, and fold laundry, and pack, and …

Two Ice Princesses, one Shark Boy, and one sword-wielding elf were ready to go. We’d weathered the Lighting of the Pumpkins and the ceremony of You Must Eat Dinner First. There was a minor conflict right at departure time because the sword was being wielded a little too enthusiastically and I wanted to leave it home. Patches felt he would be devastated without his sword, so I consented to let it come along although I knew full well that I’d be carrying it for him only two houses down the road. In fact I was pretty sure I’d end up carrying Patches too. Hmm… I made all the kids pause while I went back for the stroller.

Sure enough, as soon as Patches had his first trick-or-treat candy in hand, he opened it and began to consume. Since candy consumption slowed his walking pace to a near stop, I picked him up and plunked him in the stroller. I declined to push the stroller up the walkways, I’d stay on the sidewalk and let the kids run up to the houses. Patches didn’t mind not going to the doors. He was quite content to sit in the stroller like a maharaja and allow Kiki to bring candy to deposit into his bucket. In an attempt to get Patches to participate more fully in the experience, Kiki made him say “trick or treat” before she’d deliver the candy. He happily complied and the first obstacle to the evening’s enjoyment was easily overcome.

Gleek provided the next excitment by tripping over her long skirt in a mad dash to the next house. Gleek fell and scraped her arm. Her candy scattered across the sidewalk. She was far more upset over the potential loss of candy than the scrape, so once her treasure was safely redeposited in her bucket we went onwards cheerfully and a little more carefully. The incident made me realize that Gleek needed to slow down and not try to keep up with the bigger kids. Fortunately we had teamed up with Link’s friend. His mom volunteered to shepherd the older kids while I took a slower and more abrieviated route with Gleek & Patches.

Everyone was happy with this solution. Then a few houses later Patches realized that candy had stopped arriving in his bucket. At the next house when Gleek rang the bell and politely said “twick or tweat”, Patches hollered as loud as he could “I WANT SOME!” The kind people in the houses heard him and obligingly sent him candy via Gleek. It only took a couple of houses and a couple of hollered “I want somes!” before Gleek was trained to ask for a candy for her little brother. Now maharaja Patches got his candy delivered and he didn’t even have to say “trick or treat.” Life was good.

One advantage of shepherding young children is that their legs tire quickly. Older kids want to maximize candy accumulation, but the littler ones walk on thier tired legs and start thinking how nice it would be to sit in a warm place where they could eat the candy that is Right There In The Bucket. Gleek felt it was really important to trick or treat at our backyard neighbor’s house, so we did that and then cut through the back yard to be at home.

The ward halloween carnival was scheduled to begin at 6:30 pm. We had to show up with 4 costumed children and a pot of chili. This meant that preparations had to begin as soon as we got up. Mostly the morning preparations amounted to warning the kids that they’d have to do homework right after school, but warnings avoid tantrums. The homework was done with dispatch and the costuming began. Kiki had an elaborately upswept hairstyle with curls & glittering hairspray. So did Gleek. Kiki had ice crystal makeup. So did Gleek. All of that took more than an hour to manage. Fortunately Link could throw on his sharkboy costume and spike his own hair. Patches was happy to throw on a Link costume left over from a sibling. I was able to throw on a cloak & dress. Howard wore his cloak and a tunic. And so we arrived.

I herded the children from their over-excited running around and made them all sit and eat. They each had a bowl of chili. Gleek took a mandatory 5 bites and then helped herself to donuts from the dessert table. Kiki ate some and then pleaded she wasn’t hungry could she just go? I’ve really no idea if Link ate any healthy food at all, I wasn’t paying attention. Patches took one look at his bowl of chili, then shoved it out of the way so he could get at the candy corns that were strewn decoratively across the table. The candy corns had a chaser of tootsie rolls. That was followed by a donut, a cookie, and some jelly beans. By that time his system had reached a sort of wide-eyed over-stimulated sugar shock. He hung pretty close to me all evening. There were lots of scary looking people wandering around.

After dinner was the carnival. The teens run simple carnival games for the littler kids. Everyone has fun. Kiki, Link, & Gleek all ran gleefully from one game to the next trying to accumulate as many goodies as possible. Patches had different priorities. He’d be happy to play a game, but as soon as he had the prize candy in his hand he was not interested in doing anything else until that candy was completely consumed. As the carnival wound down I became aware that Gleek had reached the sugar-crash part of the evening where everything is cause for panic/tears. There is no reasoning with children in that state. It was time to take them home, but we ended up staying for the shadow play. (two teens behind a sheet and back lit by a spotlight pretend to take unlikely objects from someones stomach.) After that we were ready to go home when a pinata was announced. Kiki heard, Gleek didn’t, so I quickly herded Gleek & Patches out the door while Kiki & Link stayed with Howard to take a swing at the pinata.

Tomorrow is another school day. I expect rampant crankiness, but we’ll weather it. This halloween carnival is one of the highlights of the year and I’m glad we got to go.

There were some beautiful moments in the middle of this busy day. At one point I sat outside with the sun warming me gently while doing some hand-sewing on a costume cloak. The weather was perfect, leaves fluttered from trees, and I felt so contented to just be there in my yard.

Another moment was on the walk to retrieve Link from school. Gleek decided that with all those crunchy leaves on the ground she didn’t want to be confined to the stroller. So I pushed the empty stroller and Gleek ran ahead. She didn’t just run though, she ran and leaped with her arms extended like wings. She was so beautiful with her hair flying. I remember doing that, running just for the joy of feeling my body move. Running & leaping is almost like flying. Add leaves and there was bliss.

Oh, and the Northern Flicker is back. He comes to stay in our neighborhood every winter. Last year he brought Mrs. Flicker with him. He sits in my honey locust tree and calls out. Sometimes he eats walnuts that were left on the ground or on the tree. I don’t mind sharing with him, the flashes of colors from his wings brighten my day. A few mornings last winter he and Mrs. Flicker hung out on our deck where all the kids could see them and admire. Wildlife in the backyard is always cause for wonder. At various times we have had Quail, a pheasant, a sharpshinned hawk, peacocks, sparrows, magpies, northern flickers, scrub jays, seagulls, finches, a woodpecker, cats, dogs, mice, and a turtle. The turtle, cats, peacocks, & dogs all belonged to neighbors. The mice are the only visitors I could do without, they tend to take up residence inside my walls. I’m not going to count bugs and crawlies, we’d be here all night.

I need to remember that outside has happiness waiting for me to find it.

Google led me to this:
http://www.phoenixrecords.org/in3ds_poetry.php

That album was a feature of my childhood. The record belonged to my parents, but we kids literally played it to death. It was my first introduction to many of these classic poems. Before the record gave up the ghost completely one of my siblings made a tape recording of it. The copy was made by putting a tape player next to the stereo, so you can just imagine the sound quality involved. I duplicated a copy of this tape for myself and I still have it. (…somewhere, I’m sure I wouldn’t get rid of it.) Age has fuzzed it, but you can still hear the scrape of the needle across the old record and the skips where the record was scratched. I still treasure that tape and guard it, because I figured there was no other way to have access to that music. Until today. I listened to some of the sound clips online and they made me cry. I’ve NEVER heard the songs sound so good, by the time I was old enough to listen the record was already scratchy. I stumbled while singing along with “vinegar man” because the mp3 didn’t have the skip that I’d learned to adjust for.

Now I want it, but it’s $20 I don’t need to spend. Sigh. Maybe for christmas.

EDIT: I just poked around at phoneix records. They’re LOCAL! The company is run by one of the album’s original singers. Now I’m tempted to jump in my car and drive 10 minutes to his house and knock.

Today began with walnuts. Well, I guess technically it began with breakfast, but walnuts were next an they took up the largest part of this morning. Yesterday the kids spent a lot of time indoors glued to the TV, so I was determined to get them outside. Fortunately our trees have co-operated by dropping leaves all over our yard, so I was able to require the kids to go rake them. This led to hours of raking and jumping with both my kids and neighbor kids as well.

The walnut tree had not only dropped leaves, it had dropped walnuts. Some of these were gathered up last week, but most of them were still on the ground. I made the kids stop raking long enough to help me gather up the nuts. Their co-operation became much more willing after Howard came out to shake the tree. He brought down a veritable hailstorm of nuts and we picked them all up. Then I sat on the steps and pulled husks off of the walnuts while the kids played. Walnut husks are messy. They stain everything. They are even worse when they’ve been left sitting in water for a week. Yuck. I forced myself to finish the job. Now I’ve got 4 buckets and 2 dishpans full of walnuts in their shells. The next step is cracking them all open and drying them. It is a lot of work, but the walnuts from our tree are the yummiest walnuts I’ve ever tasted.

I wish I could say that the afternoon was as fruifully spent as the morning, but it wasn’t. The afternoon slipped away from me until Howard came in saying “Do we have a dinner plan?” I scrounged up a dinner and remained unmotivated to clean up the various messes that filled my home. I did have a burst of energy just before putting little kids to bed. During that I required the kids to help me clean up our family room. I managed it by saying “Let’s surprise Daddy!” They all felt like that would be fun. But Howard wandered out of his office before we were done and Gleek ordered him back in so that he could be surprised when we were done. He disapeared until summoned and was suitably “surprised.”