Is it truly fall if we don’t Instagram the crap out of our children in pumpkin patches? I think not.
Fields glow orange with pumpkin-clad photo opps. We throw on our brown boots, adorable scarf and plunk our kids down amongst some giant gourds. Boom!! Fall has arrived. Until we realize that the pumpkin patch can actually be a muddy, frigid pasture of Autumnal disaster and toddler trauma.
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| Miss Teen USSR |
So we head to Costco to buy some bacon maple syrup. Halloween is weeks away, but we should also stock up on the good candy before it’s all gone and you are left serving those gross brown globs wrapped in an orange and white wrapper with black bats, you know the one. This Costco trip followed weeks of us using a variety of justifications for why the supply is halved by Halloween.
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| Two Fun Moms |
But we deserve some candy cause we have been getting our craft on hard for this big day!
We’ve been making yummy stuff…..
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| Twin Dragonfly Designs |
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| Celiac Baby! |
Cute Stuff….
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| Parent Club |
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| This West Coast Mommy |
Gooey Stuff…
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| Food Retro |
And some of it even lasts til Halloween! Yay us!
Of course we also spend the whole two weeks leading to Halloween talking our kids out of the Elsa costume we don’t want to foot the bill on. But hey, some seasons of mothering call for buying the costume….
Just as some seasons might call for some glue guns and cardboard….
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| Twin Dragonfly Designs |
Or, we might throwback to the days of our own DIY costumes. Really, every kid should be responsible for their own DIY costume at least once in their childhood. Remember scouring thrift stores, dollar stores, your dad’s shed and mom’s craft room for costume construction materials? It builds character and bonds a generation of kids who all bought that crappy palette of face paints that stopped oxygen exchange on your skin.
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| Parent Club |
Either way, we know to always SIZE UP the costumes to accommodate for wearing PJs underneath them. We vow that every single year of their childhood, we will retell our kids the tales of our snowy Halloweens. That they were so cold we could only trick or treat on ONE street before getting so cold that it was time to go home. These tales come with the caveat that our children’s gratitude to climate change and their awesome parents must be expressed for every additional street we take them trick or treating on.
That’s where you find us wandering the neighbourhood with our friends and all our children, a designated driver manning the stroller. Sure, someone in the neighbourhood is serving hot cocoa that singes everyones’ tongues, but we pass. No, that’s not coffee in our cups but we call it Boo Juice so it’s plain festive.
If we are being honest, most of us despise the thought of taking a toddler out into the streets at night to get hopped up on candy. Though not as much as we hate the neighbourhood hooligans who think it’s ‘fun’ to blast fireworks at 930pm when we’ve finally got our kids into their beds. Thanks ‘Dad who thinks his mammogram machine costume is the most epic’, and the ‘teenage boys with backpacks full of booze and eggs’! The night is officially a write-off. So we refill our Boo Juice, ‘inspect’ our kid’s candy and smile that we get a whole year until we have to do this again.
Now, bring on the Christmas decorations!
Thank you to my fellow Canadian moms for their contributions to this piece.