It's the beginning of making plans for how we'll spend the two biggest holidays of the year and the days when Christmas music plays while I work. It's the beginning of the days when I come home and change into my most comfortable sweats and two-inch thick socks and when I begin to make shopping lists to buy the gifts we'll put under our Christmas tree.
This past Monday, we walked the streets of our neighborhood with the neighbors that we know and watched as their youngest and our oldest dug their hands into candy bowls and ran their fingers through furry coats while we met new ones and told them to help themselves to the bite-sized Laffy Taffy, tiny boxes of Nerds, and single-packaged Reese's Peanut Butter cups we left on our doorstep.
It was special.
And it wasn't as cold as we expected it to be, so the short sleeve shirt and shorts that Jake turned "Zookeeper" wore were perfect.
After two stops on our street and five ounces of the bottle I made for him before we left, our Zebra laid back as far as he could in his stroller and fell fast asleep. While Jake rang doorbells and his bucket took the major brunt of the fall he made in the seventh (or eighth?) driveway down, Parker completely missed the entire point of the night. Or maybe he didn't. He wore his costume comfortably after he settled into being okay with wearing a (very) puffy, white, one-piece with dark brown stripes and an extra heavy hood with a mane, ears, and eyes. And no, he didn't eat any candy because he can't, but he went along for the ride and was the ultimate sidekick for Big Brother. Success - I felt it because when I initially put it on him, he tugged and wailed, then tugged and wailed. He got over it.
This year, this is how Trick-or-Treat was done, and it was momentous.
And I can guarantee you the excitement of what costumes they'll wear won't wait until only two weeks prior next year.
The wheels of ideas are already turning in this head of mine, and I already look forward to the day next year when we snap pictures on the hill beside our home before the darkness takes over and then purposely not take my camera with me so I'll live in the moment as we walk down our street and watch little hands take candy from bowls and make sure "Thank you's" are given and say, "Just one more piece!" at least twice as we sit with emptied buckets on our living room floor, costumes half on, half off.
And I already look forward to the reminder that October 31st gives me that I'm in the season of the year I love most...Fall...and the season of my life that I'm so, so incredibly blessed to be in - a piece of childhood not to be taken for granted relived as a Mom to two of the greatest gifts I've ever been given (even when one isn't quite as excited about his costume as I am and the other has to be threatened within nearly an inch of his life every single day since he got it if he even thinks about eating "Just one more!!!!!" - as he says it - piece of candy).
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