I’m pretty tired this morning, but I guess that’s what you get for leaving the costume till the last minute, but Mia’s batwings are finished. I left them on the table for her to see in the morning, but I didn’t get to see her reaction when she woke up because I was still sleeping (by the way, by some freak of nature, both girls are getting up at 8am now, which is a hell of a lot better than the 6am they were doing for a long time. It makes going to bed at 2:30am more bearable for me, but this will be short lived since the infamously dreaded daylight savings time is approaching which normally puts panic in parents’ lives as schedules go all awry. When do we set our clocks back anyway?).

So I heard that Mia didn’t jump around excitedly when she found her wings at the table. She examined them and asked if they were her batwings. This is all I get??? I know she loves them and she ran around with them later to test them out after I finished fitting her for the straps, but I dunno. I guess I was expecting Christmas morning or something because she was sooooo excited for Halloween. Claudine is going as a hula girl, by the way, which is what Mia wore at that age. I was surprised to see that the Hawaiian dress fits her since she is so big, but she refused to wear the grass skirt, which was left in a heap on the floor until the cat started chewing on the straw. The hula stuff is all brought back from Hawaii from various friends and relatives, and it makes Mark’s mom weep every time because she’s from there. So Lani, this is for you. (yes, I finally figured out youtube).

It’s been non-stop today since I woke up, dealing with 2 projects and 2 deadlines. I’ve been sitting here in my room, working, watching the most incredible sunset from our balcony window which is casting a dusky purple hue on everything. Even now, although it’s dark, a dazzling orange ribbon of color is peeking through behind the building and leaves. It’s like it knows it’s Halloween. Speaking of which, I STILL haven’t gotten around to making Mia’s batwings. Talk about leaving things to the last minute. I’ll have to deal with it tonight.

We turned our heat on for the second time this season. As expected, the glorious Fall weather that we all love lasted all of 2 weeks and it almost feels like winter now. Luckily, tomorrow will warm up a bit to the low 60s, but it won’t be anything like the downright balmy weather we had for the last 2 years. Most of my Halloween memories consist of standing shivering in the cold at the Halloween Parade in the Village, with the exception of 1 Halloween 10 years ago that was so warm, a friend and I sat comfortably for 4 hours on a stoop on St. Mark’s place watching all the craziness go by. Halloween is different now with the kids of course, but it’s surprisingly not that different from the way I remember it growing up. People in our neighborhood go all out decorating their brownstones and you’ll often see makeshift graveyards, elaborate cobwebs and big giant spiders on the side of buildings (our neighborhood is very fond of that white cottony cobweb thing). Kids still go trick-or-treating house to house, and then there is the 7th Ave costume parade. Nothing like the Village of course, but when else can you run around in the street like a lunatic?

You know how when you were a kid, you just couldn’t wait for those Charlie Brown holiday specials to come on TV? Because when it did, you knew that Christmas or Halloween or Valentine’s Day was just around the corner? When I was a kid, Charlie Brown specials would air on CBS and as soon as you saw that animated CBS logo with that cheeky, percussive theme song, you knew that you were moments away from watching the show and you’d get so freaking excited.

I thought it would be great fun for the girls to stay up a wee bit past their bedtimes so we can watch “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” together. Mark made the mistake of telling Mia that she was in for a special surprise tonight and for about an hour it was all “what is it? Is it a scary surprise? Is it something to eat? What is it, huh? huh? HUH???”. So just when 8:00 was about to roll around, Mark made hot cocoa for us all - it was the perfect stormy night for huddling together on the couch under a blanket. We turn Charlie Brown on. Blank faces. They watch some more. Still, blank faces. “Um, is there anything on after this?”. We try to explain how great Charlie Brown is, how we used to watch it as kids, how it’s an icon of American pop culture. More blank faces with an occasional giggle from Claudine who seems amused by Snoopy. “Isn’t Snoopy funny?” we say. “Yeah”.

Oh well…

We went to a really lovely dinner party/playdate on the upper west side over the weekend and found these personalized mini pumpkins as table settings at each plate, all drawn by hand by my friend’s 6 year old daughter. Such a cute idea, and now they are sitting on our table (yeah, who needs to go pumpkin picking?). It’s a really rainy day here in NYC. Not so great if you have to be out and about, but sorta nice to watch it from the inside. Can you believe I still haven’t made Mia’s batwings? it’s getting down to the wire and it might have to be a hackjob since I have many deadlines and I’m sick on top of that. What are your kids going as for Halloween?

For our 6 month anniversary on etsy. Also, we’re oh-so-close to our 1000th sale, so we thought this might help move us closer to that milestone. So for a limited time all shortbread and biscotti are 20% off (prices are already reduced in the shop).

Somehow we missed pumpkin picking this year and the way the week is turning out, we may not even get to carve any since we don’t have any large pumpkins in house, but Mia got to get her craft on at the annual harvest fair that happens at the little park across the street from our apartment. Have you seen more festive, gittery pumpkins?

With all the craziness of recent weeks, I’ve really dropped the ball on getting Mia’s costume together. Last year I made her this purple crayon costume out of felt (Claudine, then still a baby, went as Harold which was our lazy way of saying she was in costume, but really she was just in footed pajamas). Right after Halloween, Mia had her costumes all lined up for the next four years and this year she wanted to be a bat. Maybe you’ve already guessed that Mia isn’t such a girly girl, though out of peer pressure, she has taken more of an interest in dressing up in princess outfits when she’s with her girl friends. I can sense that this year she’s gotten a bit confused about the growing gender differences and play preferences between boys and girls because she can still wrestle with the best of the boys and she plays with boys more often on a day to day basis. So I can tell that she really wants to be a bat, but is a bit worried that she’ll be different from her girl friends who are all dressing up as princesses and ballerinas. I’ve secretly enjoyed the fact that she didn’t get into the princess phase, but understand completely about “fitting in”, so we decided that she will go as a “ballerina bat” this year. I’ll still make her some bat wings, but she’ll also put on a black tutu so it’ll be more, um feminine? I don’t know, it’s nuts that all this gender craziness starts so early. Even 2 years ago when she and her friends were 2-3 years old, the girls were dressing up as fairies and princesses. Mia wanted to be a moth, so she went as a moth. Gotta love my little girl and I hope she doesn’t change.

For some reason I couldn’t fall asleep last night and ended up going to bed at 5am. A few years ago, I would have been waking up around that hour because Mia was an early riser for years until Claudine came along. I got up at 8:30 this morning and actually felt fine, but I am crashing now. So what do you do at 4am when you can’t go to sleep? I worked on our new website, emailed about a freelance job, bounced around the internet and wrote some emails. A few hours later, I woke up to an email about a new freelance project referred from a friend that will start tomorrow, got some orders in our inbox and saw that we were on the etsy front page again. Mark also got a call from a store inquiring about wholesale. Funny what a difference a few hours make. The world chugs along while we sleep. We need to keep things going as well, but first…more coffee.