As you may have heard, the Harvest Festival is this weekend!  And then we’re moving!  And then we’re celebrating Halloween!  Let me tell you what all that means to me.  It means my to-do list is constantly growing as I email volunteers and sort through various supplies and try to figure out how to set up Gone Fishin’.  It means my body is constantly aching as I spend hours and hours purging stuff we’ve been hoarding and boxing up all the stuff we’re keeping and planning an emergency trip to IKEA.    And it means waiting with anticipation for Troy to finally start working on his and Huck’s costumes, which will eventually look something like this:

Though Troy has begged and pleaded for Huck to come up with something a little, say, easier to buy off the Target costume racks, especially this year of all years, Huck is PASSIONATE that they both be volcanoes.  Troy’s got two sheets that he’s going to attach to hula hoops and paint like crazy.  Huck wants red, yellow and orange tissue paper coming out of his head to look like fire.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing things like spending hundreds of dollars at Oriental Trading on prizes for the Harvest Festival games, and this being my last year to officially be in charge of such important things I decided to make a somewhat controversial decision and order some really sugary Halloween-themed candy.  The other day I sorted through all the prizes and grabbed a few samples to give to Huck, including a disgusting looking eyeball lollipop.  He ate it and then a few hours later during dinner we noticed that the entire top half of his body had broken out into a horrible rash.  By the morning it was much better but we kept him home from school and took him to the doctor who suspects he may be allergic to the food dye used in the eyeball lollipop.  Which is pretty hilarious and ironic, since it was my naughty idea. 

During Huck’s fake sick day we made some Halloween sugar cookies,  and while they were baking he excitedly began making decorations for our front door.  He took his ever growing collection of bank deposit slips and began cutting and stapling them into awkward letters, planning to spell out HAPPY HALLOWEEN.  He quickly gave that up and moved onto something else, and I assumed he was filling our black door with elaborate orange pumpkins and scary white ghosts, sort of a last Holiday Hurrah for Apartment 9H!  Instead I found two uncolored insane looking jack o’lanterns about the size of very tiny plums and spaced a ridiculous distance from each other, forever attached to the door by an entire roll of scotch tape.

A few hours  later we ate dinner and then enjoyed our Halloween cookies full of frosting.  And food dye.  And then the rash returned, making Huck look exactly like a volcano.

Oh, Halloween.