Halloween Week

Wow, it’s Thursday night already. Where did the time go? Let’s see… where did I leave off? Sunday… I met Missie at our usual Sunday morning spot: the Cheesecake Factory. That place is always crazy except for 10 AM on Sunday mornings. The weather was awesome so we sat outside. I see Missie probably once a month but we have one of those relationships were it doesn’t matter how much time has passed. We used to do happy hours fairly regularly until we had kids. I had Ty with me and he was a little fussy. I even breastfed him at the restaurant, knowing that my rights were protected by the city of Chandler. I had been feeling a little naughty while breastfeeding while all the city council crap was going on. We walked around the mall a little bit and then decided to go to DSW, one of the biggest discount shoe places around. It’s like shoe heaven. We each bought a pair. Missie couldn’t bring herself to buy a pair with a closed front AND back so she bought some closed toe mules. I bought a shoe with a closed toe and back but have yet to wear any closed toe shoes this year. One of the benefits of living in Phoenix I suppose… our tootsies are cramped only 2 months out of the year.

After I got home, Brian went out to get the stain for the concrete floor. This stuff was amazing. After he put it on, I couldn’t smell the cat pee on the concrete. Brian wants to get rid of the cats but I cannot do that. I’ve had them for almost 10 years now and they are my responsibility although thank God someone wrote somewhere that pregnant women shouldn’t scoop a litter box. I extrapolated that to mean breastfeeding women shouldn’t clean it either. Tee hee.


On Monday I went to Jack’s school to see the kids dress up for Halloween. The 2 year olds were all really cute. They kept asking me to take photos of them and then show them the photo on the camera. I could have stayed there for hours. They kept attacking me because I had something of interest to them: a digital camera.
After work, we got home and got Jack dressed up as Elmo and hit the streets. Brian took his place out front with his full size candy bars for the kids and beers for the adults. After growing up thinking that Halloween was satanic, this was the first time I have ever gone trick or treating. Fortunately, I had a 2 year-old with me so most people thought Jack was trick or treating.

I thought it was pretty awesome. There were gobs of kids in our neighborhood running around and Jack thought that was pretty cool. Everyone was saying, “HEY ELMO!” to Jack. I liked the way everyone was sitting in their driveways as well. I found a new potential baby-sitter and chatted with a few other people. It was all very neighborly. What an awesome holiday.

Back to the dining room floor… so the cats had peed on the baseboards as well as the floor so we were going to have to replace those to the tune of like $800. While I was sitting out front on Halloween, eating my M&M’s swiped from Jack’s candy loot and drinking a beer from Brian’s stash, I decided that the stain we used on the floor, which was white, could be used for the baseboards. This took 20 minutes to do and because we saved $800, I think I deserve to buy another Coach purse.

I worked from home on Wednesday and the flooring guys came over. I thought it was going to be a no-go because of a crack in the concrete (the floor wasn’t level) but they figured it out and now we have a beautiful wood floor.

Jack stayed up really late Monday night because it was Halloween. My theory is that now he thinks it’s super fun to stay up late every night. Tuesday night he really fought going to bed and last night he did it again. We had him in his room with a gate on the door so we decided to ignore his cries of protest and watch Alias. He comes out to the family room, matter of factly says “Hi.” And sits down on the sofa. How did he get out? Of course Brian said that I didn’t latch the gate properly because it was it was sitting by Jack’s door already latched. After putting him back in the room and gate up, Brian witnesses Jack reaching over the gate, effortlessly lifting the latch, and removing the gate. So much for that.

I’ve been having so much upper back pain from hunching over the breast pump and then this morning it was so bad that I had to make a call to a day spa close to work to see if they could give me a deep tissue massage. They got me in at 11:45 AM and she really dug into my back hard… but it hurt so good. Finally after days of horrible pain, I had a pain free afternoon. Brian worked late tonight so I had both boys by myself. Jack has taken to eating while standing on a chair at the center island in the kitchen. Brian won’t let Jack eat while standing there but I’m OK with it so I stood and ate while he ate. I managed to get both in bed without too much excitement and now here I am… Whew.