Happy Halloween!

I think my most/least favorite Halloween memory was 1997. 

Our oldest son fell off of the jungle gym at preschool and suffered a compound fracture.  I received a call from the school staff as the ambulance was pulling away from the school. It was 4 days before Halloween.(Oct. 28)

It's funny the things you remember. I had a pot of ramen noodles boiling on the stove. I turned the burner off, grabbed the baby out of the crib, pulled my toddler out of his bed and took off for the hospital. (This was before cell phones.) I left a note pinned to the door for my husband along with a request for him to call his parents to see if they could meet us at the hospital. I had bought a huge pumpkin that morning, and had plans to carve it that afternoon with the kids. The pumpkin was still sitting in the back seat of the car.

Husband got home about 10 minutes after I left the house, and his parents were able to meet me in the waiting room at the hospital and take the kids home with them. (And my car. It had the car seats.) We found out that the kid was going to need surgery to reset the arm.

It was a very long night. He went back for surgery around 10 pm, and came out around midnight. He asked his father to spend the night with him, and I went home. Remember the ramen noodles? They were still on the stove, sitting in water.  They were next level awful looking. They went into the trash.

When he came home the following day, he had 2 pins in his arm around his elbow and a cast that took over most of his left arm, with a sling built into the cast.

Halloween day, I decided that we needed to keep things as normal as possible. So, I pulled the pumpkin out of the back of my car. The pumpkin that had been sitting there for 4 days. In the heat. In the back of my Honda Civic. While the toddler used it as a step stool to get into his car seat. The bottom was rotting.

So, I put the pumpkin on the grass, turned it over and scooped out the guts.  It turns out that if you do things this way - with rotting pumpkin - it is actually very easy to scoop things out. We decided to leave the entrails, if you will all over the ground and cut a very weird lopsided face into the side of the pumpkin and then put multiple tealights around the mess.  As the pumpkin continued to rot and fall apart in the heat of the tea lights, it made an especially gory mess.

The kid with the broken arm dressed up as a starving artist that year.  I had a beret (no comments about that - we weren't THAT far out of the 80's).  He wore sweat pants and a huge t-shirt that we were able to get the cast through.  We attached a piece of cardboard cut out and decorated to look like an artists' palette.  Voila!  1 starving artist costume!

I hope each and every one of you has a safe Halloween!