How many people with a three year old kid can say that their kid has already wanted to be an octopus twice for Halloween? Because we can. Maya was Hank, the octopus from “Finding Dory” this year. She had the costume picked out early on. We toyed with the notion of having all four of us dress up to coordinate with Maya, but we couldn’t quite pull it together. Instead, Ian was Mickey Mouse.

Maya as Hank, Halloween 2016

Unfortunately, a couple weeks before Halloween, Ian came down with some kind of miserable coughing, stuffy-headed, fever-inducing crud that kept him out of school for three days. Maya followed behind him that very next weekend, going one further and developing an ear infection on top of it.

Ian as Mickey Mouse, Halloween 2016

This is the first year she was going to go trick or treating. The past couple years, we’ve taken the kid or kids to the local block party instead. Last year, we tried to talk her into it, but she told us she wasn’t going to actually say “trick or treat,” so we decided against it. She was very excited about it this year. She and Ian had been practicing their delivery and had their cool candy buckets all ready to go.

But Maya was sick. Ian was over the worst of his illness, but he was still coughing a bit and was clearly a bit run down. We vacillated on whether or not to stay home, but in the end, we decided to let the kids try out a few houses and see how it went. We were careful to keep our germs to ourselves and kept our outing fairly short. The kids seemed to really love it, and our neighbors had gotten into the spirit of things, decorating yards and houses and wearing costumes themselves. Maya not too subtly suggested that we should decorate our house too next year.

Jack-o’-lanterns

We did carve pumpkins. Sean ran out and got a big pumpkin for each kid. During our date night, Anna helped the kids choose a design and draw it on their pumpkins. Then I gutted and carved them as time permitted during the week. Maya chose, you guessed it, an octopus. Ian has been pretty smitten with jack-o-lanterns, and so he and Anna went the more traditional route on his. I don’t know if it was the quality of our pumpkins or the warm, moist air, but those pumpkins rotted very quickly this year. I bet we didn’t have them out three or four days before they had to be thrown out.

The Friday before Halloween, the kids attended the carnival at their school. This was before Maya got sick, or we wouldn’t have gone. This basically means that Ian walked around with us and nibbled on candy. Maya alternated between the bouncy house and the big blow up slide the school had set up in their parking lot. We tried to take Ian into a slightly more sedate little blow up maze type thing. He crawled about two feet inside, sat down and played with plastic balls until I pulled him back out.

Pumpkin Patch – early October – 90 degrees

I’m really glad we eked out a bit of Halloween fun in all this. That illness was a soul-crusher. The kids could hardly sleep for coughing so horribly. Maya was actually to the point where her breathing was labored. Both of them wound up hitting the albuterol again. Sean and I, of course, both got sick too, but it was definitely less pronounced with us. We didn’t have any fever, and it didn’t seem to last quite so long. From Halloween on, our year is full of birthdays and holidays. All of us being well during that entire time simply isn’t very likely. We do our best to celebrate regardless.

Our plan had been to take the kids to visit their grandparents over the week of fourth of July. After some serious sticker shock over the price of flights, we scooted our trip to the week of Labor Day and did this crazy deal where we flew into Memphis, drove down to Birmingham, drove from Birmingham to Friedheim, drove from Friedheim to Memphis, and finally flew back home. All in the name of saving money on our four plane tickets.

Ian is slowly making his peace with air travel

In many ways, our travel luck on this trip was terrible. It took something like two hours for us to get our rental car in Memphis that first evening, which pushed our arrival in Homewood / Birmingham into very late territory. On our way home on the last day, they simply cancelled the Houston to Austin leg of our flight, and we wound up renting a car and driving home. This wouldn’t have been too bad except it took them FOREVER to get our bags off the first leg of our flight and into our hands. We could have gone on and they’d have sent our bags to us, but we had to have them because Maya’s car seat was checked. We got home very late, and then on top of that, Sean dropped me and the kids off so I could get them to bed, while he went and returned the rental and picked our car up from the airport.

On the other hand, Ian seems to now be capable enough of entertaining himself that he didn’t scream for the entire flight. It was amazing. The amount of relief I felt cannot be adequately described. Here’s hoping it’s not just a fluke! Even the sometimes long car drives were handled with relatively little distress.

We got to do many fun things with the grandparents. In Alabama, we again got to go to the very fun pool in Homewood. Maya and Ian showed off some of the jumping-in skills they were learning in their swim lessons, and everyone had a very good time playing in the water.

Pop on a bed of nails

The kids also got to visit the McWane Science Center again, which kept both of them busy and entertained for a period of time.

What was nice about the McWane Center visit in particular is that Sean and I did our best to melt away and let Lolli and Pop hang out with the kids. With Ian, if I’m too close, he’s probably going to stick with me, and during the Alabama leg of our visit, he was still getting over a bit of a cold and wasn’t feeling very sociable.

More McWane center fun

The kids both loved all the cats at Lolli and Pop’s house. Ian, hugger of all things furry, was especially enamored with Baa-baa, who would put up with Ian laying on him and giving him a full-body hug without complaint. We even caught him several times sitting comfortably in Baa-baa’s pretty pink cat-bed.

Ian loves Baa-baa. Baa-baa tolerates Ian.

Maya, like her cousin AP before her, has developed a complete infatuation with Pop. It feels like we hardly saw her while we were in Alabama because all she wanted to do was hang out with him. He taught her how to play hide and seek, which she has been playing with us at the house ever since. He played with her endlessly, whenever she wanted. It was very sweet.

Grandpa teaching Ian about money and credit

The two things Maya had latched onto about her past visits to her grandparents’ house in Missouri was their really spectacular room full of toys and their equally fun pond full of fish and turtles that Maya got to feed. Unfortunately, their pond had “turned over” earlier in the year and everything in it died. When we got there, the pond had dwindled to “large puddle” status and was devoid of most living things. Maya and I still walked down there and watched the dragonflies skim along the water though.

Discovery Play House

The kids’ fun outing in Missouri was to visit the Discovery Play House. There were so many things for both the kids to do there. Other than Ian falling and knocking the bejesus out of his poor forehead, it was a very fun visit.

Aunt Rachel, Maya, Grammy, and Nathan

We had a day where all the cousins were at Grammy and Grandpa’s house too, and that was a lot of fun. Maya and Ian joined Henry and Rosie and Lily and Nathan in making spin art paintings. Paper spins quickly in circles and the artist drips paint (or in Maya’s case, squirts a giant glob of paint) onto it, and the spinning motion flings the paint outward. The kids all seemed to really enjoy it, and they made some really neat paintings.

Toucan twins – Maya and Rosie

As many of our trips have been, this one was hard, but good. The kids really seemed to connect with their grandparents more quickly this time around and spent a lot more time playing with them. It was fun to see Maya beckon Sean’s dad with an extended “Po-o-o-o-o-p!” from whatever distant room she happened to be in. It was cute to watch Ian climb around on Grandpa and grin when he played with his beard. It was adorable to hear Ian talk about his “Wahwee” (Lolli) and to see Maya monopolize Grammy’s time to color stencil after stencil after stencil.