Our October was weirdly busy, especially for us. We spent the first few days of the month vacationing in Miami. I came back to jury duty (luckily, I wasn’t selected). We went to Dallas the next weekend to celebrate cousin AP’s 5th birthday. Then Maya was sick for a little while. And finally, we were to the point where we needed to get her around some pumpkins and into a Halloween costume.

Maya at the pumpkin patch – 23 months old

Last weekend we went to the same pumpkin patch we went to last year. Possibly my mood was a little soured by the fact that it was 90 degrees outside, but it just wasn’t as pleasant as last year. There weren’t many pumpkins (possibly due to how late in October we were going) and the placement and arrangements just weren’t as photogenic. Also, Maya has gotten downright ornery about having her photo taken. She really just has no interest at this point.

Daddy is a trooper

What Maya did love was taking beanbags out of the wooden beanbag game and dropping them back in again, over and over again, possibly forever. She also had fun feeding the goats, though she didn’t understand why she couldn’t climb the fence and get in the pen with them. There was also a giant tubular slide that she and Sean slid down several times. Apparently it was very fast and he was worried that Maya would be scared, but the moment they landed at the bottom she was grinning and asking for more.  And as if all that wasn’t enough, they had blow-up bouncy horse things that Maya rode with Sean, which of course she enjoyed.

In the end, we did manage to wrangle Maya in and amongst the pumpkins and trick her into looking happy for a few quick frames while Sean snapped photos.

I never claimed to be Martha Stewart

We haven’t really done too many crafty type things with Maya yet. She’s finger painted plenty. She colors a little bit with crayons and has an undying love of sticking stickers. For Halloween, I did a little looking into crafts that a not-quite-2-year-old could manage and happened upon some little pumpkins that were made by sticking tissue paper to contact paper. Maya tired after maybe four or five minutes so I wound up doing most of it, but regardless, they were cute and she seemed to enjoy the bit that she did. Anna of course was responsible for the remainder of the decorations on our door.

Kitty cat jack-o-lantern

The jack-o-lantern was a full house affair. Anna and Maya drew the design, I gutted and carved the pumpkin, and Sean installed and lit the candle while I corralled the grabby toddler.

Maya the Octopus

Choosing Maya’s halloween costume was a little difficult for us. We wanted it to be something she’d be interested in, but most of her interests are so fleeting it’s tough to really choose. She’s still enamored with tigers and roars frequently, but we did that last year. Finally, we settled on dressing her as an octopus.

See, I’m Oddipuddy

For those that don’t know, Maya’s security toy is a little stuffed octopus. Around eight or nine months old, when separation anxiety was making bedtime particularly heart-wrenching, we noticed that Maya the crawler was dragging her toy octopus around with her. Once we saw the attachment and started letting her sleep with it, she went back to calmly working herself to sleep. Her cousin AP named him Oddipuddy a while back and the name has stuck.

I did toy with the idea of making her an octopus costume, but I didn’t like what I’d have to give up to have time to do that, so we hunted one up on Amazon. Believe it or not, we had several to choose from, so we were able to select a costume whose colors roughly matched her little Oddipuddy.

On our way to the block party

We were lucky that it cooled off enough for her to wear her warm costume. We didn’t trick or treat yet this year, but that didn’t mean there were no festivities. The morning of Halloween, nanny Anna took Maya to a little kid party, which by all accounts she thoroughly enjoyed. That evening we walked our little octopus down the street to a block party where she nibbled on all kinds of goodies and got to play in a bouncy house. Much to her delight, she even got to wear her costume to her music class on Saturday morning.

All-in-all we had an eventful but relatively successful October. Now we’re on to manage Maya’s birthday, Thanksgiving, and the Christmas season all (hopefully) before kid 2 shows up in January!