My dearest little Bugs,
October has past, and with it Halloween. It is unlikely either of you has noticed yet, as I suspect neither one of you has come down from the sugar high you’ve been on over the past three days.
Yeah, you heard me: three days. Once upon a time Halloween was just one night, during which children could door-to-door asking for candy and Republicans could go on news channels and weep for the Satan influences on America’s children. However, something seems to have changed since I was a kid, and now Halloween lasts for days and days, with little treats for kids and lot of flickering candlelight It’s like Hanukkah for the undead.
We’ll get to the Halloween festivities in a bit, but let’s first let’s talk about you two girls.
Let’s start off with the Butterfly, who continues to be a happy and goofy little girl. Well, less little anymore: the apparent bottomless pit that was the Butterfly’s stomach last month turns out to be not-so-bottomless after all, and this month she’s chunked up a healthy extra three pounds or so. In particular, she’s finally sporting a bit of a fat baby belly and a little pair of man-boobs, which means that (a) I’m no longer panicked that she’ll blow away in a sudden breeze and (b) her wardrobe is suddenly (and unexpectedly) sporting a lot more midriff-revealing outfits.
This month has seen a marked increase in the Butterfly’s verbal abilities. While she still signs for most of her needs, she’s been experimenting much more with sounds and vocalizations this month, like a diminutive one-woman performance of Quest for Fire. While she’s adept at repeating sounds and can therefore say things like Mama and Dada when prompted, she’s still pretty reluctant to use words when left to her own volition. The only major exceptions to this rule are:
- Dat!, a ubiquitous phrase always accompanied by a pointing hand. It can be translated quite precisely as “the thing at which I am currently pointing,” or less precisely as “That.”
- Mmmmbah!, which roughly translates to “Bath.” Bath time remains one of the Butterfly’s favorite activities. Of course, the Butterfly has yet to comprehend or appreciate the actual cleanliness concept behind bath time, and instead uses the tub as a laboratory to test various hypotheses about optimal water displacement and bowel buoyancy, which is to say that really likes to splash and poop in the tub. Perhaps not coincidentally, bath time is increasingly less popular with the Ladybug.
- Dit-der, which means “Sister,” which is how she always refers to the Ladybug. In fact, it’s typically the first thing the Butterfly says in the morning: she wants to be where her big sister is, or perhaps more accurately, she wants to be where her big sister’s toys are.
- Bye bye, which translates to, well, “Bye bye.” She typically announces it to indicate her desire to leave a particular locale, although in recent weeks she’s also used it to indicate her desire for other people to leave a particular locale instead. For example, last month when I would drop the Butterfly off at daycare, she would whine and fuss and cry when I tried to leave the premises. However, after two months she’s become friendly with the teachers there, including Miss Barb, who will always give her a little pre-breakfast treat to ease the stress of my departure. So effective was this that now when we arrive at daycare, the Butterfly heads straight to Miss Barb, then turns to me and announces Bye bye!, blows a kiss in my general direction, and then patiently waits for me to get the hell out the room so she can eat her treats.*
* To her credit, however, the Butterfly is actually pretty sweet to me. One of our favorite joint activities is to just cuddle on my lap, which has become her primary mode of seating. In addition to providing quality daddy-daughter time, the lap-sitting process is also funny as hell. The Butterfly will typically stand a few feet in front of my lap, and will then turn around and blindly back up into it in a slow, retrograde waddle that practically demands to accompanied by a steady beeep… beeep…. beeeep… sound. This means that she doesn’t so much sit in my lap as collapse backwards it when she eventually gets close enough to trip on one of my legs.
As for the Ladybug, October found her being extraordinarily artistic. Every loose scrap of paper in the house has been more or less appropriated by the Ladybug for her never-ending art projects. This month as seen her drawings evolve from simple portraits to fully articulated scenes, such as the following illustration of me (on the left with spiky hair) and the Queen B (on the right) at the movies, sharing a big bag of popcorn and a box of Junior Mints:
(PS. those aren’t walking sticks we’re carrying. Apparently they’re our extraordinarily skinny drinks.) She’s also experimenting with animals, and can draw a fairly impressive platypus, suggesting a lucrative future in Disney animation. The Ladybug has also been keeping up with the Lowe’s building projects, in October adding an adjustable fun-house mirror and a flapping bat mobile to her collection of finished projects. Next month she’s planning on making a periscope and taking over Paige Hemmis’ job on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
The Ladybug has also decided to grow out her bangs this month on the grounds that it would make it easier to do her hair for her dance class. Unfortunately, right now their going through the awkward stage when they’re long enough to complete obscure her eyes, but short enough to be difficult to clip out of the way. Personally, it’s driving me nuts, as the Ladybug is clumsy enough as it is without the added challenge of visual impairment, and thus she spends are great portion of her time anymore simply walking into large inanimate objects at speed. The Ladybug, however, loves it, as it adds to a quality she possesses that she calls sassiness, which I can only surmise does not include either echolocation or common sense.
Besides Halloween (which we’re getting to), the big event this month was a visit from the girls’ grandparents (and my folks), Nana and Papa Shoo, and their great-grandmother Nana S. For the Butterfly, this was the first time she got to meet these people (and vice versa). To say we were a little worried about this would be putting it mildly. The Ladybug, for example, was initially terrified of her Papa Shoo (or, more correctly, terrified of the big hairy thing attached to his upper lip), and we had no reason to believe the Butterfly would react any differently. Hell, the Queen B’s mother, the Nana B, actually went with us to China to fetch the Butterfly and then spent the following three weeks with her in Rapid City, but in all that time the most the Ladybug would tolerate from this non-parental-person without bursting into tears was the occasional high five. Moreover, given the Butterfly’s earlier tendencies to indicate her displeasure with someone by, say, the gouging out of their eyes whilst screaming at them, we were pretty sure this was going to be the weekend when our family was written out of the will.
But the weirdest thing happened. There was no panic, no tentative apprehension, no gouging of the eyes! She got along with her grandparents! Yay! They’ve still got an inheritance!
Of course, it goes without saying that the Ladybug was also delighted to have her grandparents visit, for several reasons. She was excited to see Papa Shoo, because she wanted to show him all the things she had built at Lowe’s over the summer. She was excited to see Nana Shoo, because she knew she could extort a trip to Chuck E. Cheese out of her. (And she did, by the way. Managed to buy some candy and a dinosaur excavation kit with her tickets, too.)
However, once the grandparents headed back home to California, the only thing that mattered any more was Halloween. Ladybug knew this and knew it well, and had in fact spent much of the month of October debating what costume she was going to wear for all the upcoming events. An early choice was to dress up as Candace from Phineas and Ferb, which would have only required a red top, white skirt, orange wig, and an eighteen-inch-long neck. Of course, almost immediately Vanessa Doofenshmirtz came up as a rival choice, to which she quickly gravitated in the vain hope that I would buy her a cool black leather body suit with matching high-heeled boots.
While my immediate reaction to that particular request was “Hell-to-the-No,”, I rephrased it slightly by suggesting that the she might wear last year’s Cinderella-meets-Tron dress. The sudden realization that she had (very nearly) infinitely many princess dress tucked away under her bed almost made the Ladybug catatonic with costume conundra. For days after she weighed the various pros and cons of her different dresses, before finally settling on the short list: a sassy Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, complete with a brown-paper Toto and ruby sneakers:
or an Ice Princess,complete with a frosting of make-up designed to evoke the chill of winter. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, possibly.
In the end, as the photographic record attests, she opted for both, being the Kansas farm girl for her two pre-Halloween parties and Frosty the snow gal for Halloween proper. For the Butterfly, costume was a much simpler choice. She had no idea what Halloween was or that it was coming, and so she was happy as a clam to be dressed up as a bumblebee each time.
Indeed, after making the mental connection the first night that donning her Apidean apparel apparently caused strangers to give bags of candy to her, the Butterfly practically demanded* to wear it the next night two nights. I’m not sure how well she’s going to take it tonight when she discovers that the yellow winged jumper has lost its sugar-coated charm, but I suppose if all else fails I can put her into a sugar-induced coma for a couple days while I sort it out.
The girls’ epic Halloween started on Friday night, or “Halloween-2” for the mathematically inclined. Their daycare threw its annual party, a little get-together that involved hot dogs, a cake walk, and any number of “carnival” style games. For the Ladybug, this was a familiar event, and she flitted from game to game, staying just long enough each time enough to fill her bucket with candy before sneaking off to a corner to eat it all before I could catch her and tell her otherwise.
For the Butterfly, however, this was virgin territory, and she went hog wild. Literally, as a matter of fact. The Butterfly spent the first fifteen minutes of the party by the grill, stuffing hot dogs into her face at a rate that would have made Hirofumi Nakajima proud. Indeed, when the cooks couldn’t keep up with the porcine pace she required, the Butterfly would actually go a steal hot dogs from her friends’ plates and, occasionally, right out of their hands. Eventually she found the cake walk, and spent the remainder of the evening dancing around in the middle of it, blissfully oblivious to the pedestrian traffic jams she left in her wake.
On Saturday night, we went to a friend’s party, which also involved grilled hot dogs and carnival games. Once again, the Ladybug spent the night cyclically filling and then emptying her candy bucket, while the Butterfly wrangled hot dogs from passersby and tried to find a cake walk. In fact, there was no cake walk at the second party, but as I learned after discovering the Butterfly was at one point completely soaked, paradoxically for one-year-old, from the waist up, there was bobbing for apples. Apparently, the Butterfly got quite good at that, too, so all that bath time fun is paying off.
Sunday was the actual All Hallow’s Eve,and we preceded the nocturnal candy run with the annual carving of pumpkins. This year marked the Ladybug’s first attempt at carving her own pumpkin. When I suggested that she draw the face she wanted to carve on the pumpkin, she pulled the hollowed orb to her, stared at it for a full minute as if contemplating the visage within, and then sketched her pumpkin’s face:
(This is more or less actual size too.) Eventually I convinced her to try a bigger, more basic face on the other side of the pumpkin (big triangles for eyes and nose and a big smiling mouth), whereupon she carefully cut out the shapes and set her pumpkin out on the porch for all to see.
The Butterfly, it should be noted, was far more ambivalent about the pumpkin carving experience. While she delighted in the initial excitement of stepping around on the newspaper and trash bag lining I’d spread out over the kitchen floor, the momentary amusement of scooping out pumpkin guts quickly evaporated when some of said guts got on her feet. In the attempt to extract the stringy seedy pulp from her foot, she actually managed to get it even more tangled, sending her into a state of comical panic as she tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to de-pulp her foot, eventually deciding that the only way to solve the problem was by gnawing her own leg off.
Fortunately for the Butterfly, we were able to save the foot, and she was able to go trick-or-treating later that night in the old-timey Victorian neighborhood of Rapid City. The Ladybug, now four years versed in the “trick or treat” procedure and going through serious sugar withdrawal from the previous two days, hustled her way from house to house like a saccharine-addled speed freak. The Butterfly, on the other hand, was much more tentative. For the first several houses, she clung to my leg while I procured candy for her, but by the end of the second block she was strolling up garden paths to demand candy from strangers. Then, once she had placed said candy in the basket I was carrying, she’d pull an about face and go right back to the same door a second time in the hopes of scoring more loot. The fact that she tried this one every subsequent house makes me admire the kid’s persistence; that it never seemed to work makes me worry for her faculties of reasoning.
Happy Halloween, little bugs. And no more candy!
— Ba ba
