Happy Halloween

It's certainly fitting that it's Halloween today, seeing as I'm staggering around work like a zombie. I was up waaay too late last night preparing for tonight and I'm tired. I don't know why it is, but I always seem to seriously underestimate the length of time it's going to take to carve a pumpkin. And honestly, it's not one of my favourite pastimes. The kids always want to help, and there are just too many knives involved for my liking. So I bought a pumpkin carving kit at the dollar store which consists of several spooky stencils, a little serrated saw/knife, and a thing for poking holes in the pumpkin that you use to outline the lines on the stencil once it's taped to the pumpkin.

Well the first stroke of luck was that Rae fell asleep during dinner so I was spared the battle over helping use sharp implements and the bedtime battle. Yeah, I could have woken her, but she'd eaten most of her dinner and hey, she can have a bath tonight. So I carried her into bed and began to eviscerate the pumpkin. (Leah: Mommy, what does eviscerate mean? Me: to pull the guts out of. Leah: Oh. So when Elvis pees outside his litter box, you get so mad you'd like to eviscerate him? Me: Ummm. Something like that.) That was the thickest-walled pumpkin I've ever met. I swear, it was 4 inches thick all the way around. So Leah and I chose a stencil and taped it on and she began to punch the little holes through the stencil into the pumpkin.

Suddenly it was 8 p.m. and time for her to go to bed with the stencil only half picked out. As I was tucking her in, she said sleepily, "Don't forget the treats for school tomorrow." Treats? School? Tomorrow? CRAP. That's right, it was in the newsletter, I knew that. Rae is off the hook for contributions for the JK Halloween party, but Leah is supposed to bring something to share. "Don't worry," I tell her, "you'll have treats".

So, long story short, I was up til past 11 carving a flaming skull into a pumpkin and making a batch of ginger cookies while listening to the Tragically Hip way too loud and wondering if I should break into the bottle of home-made red wine I was given as a souvenir of last weekend's wedding that has the bride and groom's picture on it.

I didn't. But I'm feeling so tired today that I wish I had. I couldn't feel any worse.