Halloween

This Halloween was bittersweet, and not just because a neighbor handed out grapefruits and sweet tarts (okay I'm kidding. It was grapefruits and twizzlers). This was the first Halloween where Stef did the friend trick-or-treating thing. Because I was with Stef a lot on Friday and Saturday, I was privy to the extensive texting, phone calls, and in-person meetings necessary to get five pre-teen girls to agree (eventually) on a meeting spot. I didn't even ask her if she wanted to trick or treat with Jess and I, fearing it would shoot me into some type of Halloween-induced fourth dimension for interfering with the sanctity of the first ever friend-trick-or-treating-without-my-parents-plan.

I still vividly remember walking a 16 month old Stef through the Scotch Plains Municipal Building, her Blues Clues tail wagging back and forth as I tried to explain to her that if she held out her bag a stranger would drop a piece of candy in it. This was her first official active participation in trick or treating; at 4 months old we pushed her around in her stroller up the block for all of 5 minutes, her annoyance with an itchy pumpkin costume soon abundantly transparent.

It's another example of the "they grow up so fast" axiom, although she still isn't too old to share a tootsie roll with the old man.