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.