Well I'll Be...When Planning for Halloween Goes Wrong

Ok, I am a planner. I do it for a living, I do it in my personal life. I am always ready with a plan of action to prevent potential disaster. My wedding - didn't find a place until Halloween and was done with seating before my goal of New Year's Eve, despite the fact that my wedding was not until March. So when a blizzard hit the week of my wedding, I still managed to sleep on my wedding the day. The photographer was so shocked to see a bride so relaxed that she snapped a picture. School for my daughter - started looking for kindergarten schools back in 2010 or 2011 - she is the class of 2014. But along the way I tripped onto a great free school that started at pre-K 3 and goes to 8th grade, and we got in. So what did I do - I started researching high schools! I figure I have ten years to research and track the progress of schools I'm interested in and then figure out a way to pay or not pay for it. Back in the early 2000s when I was living in Brooklyn, I'd go to the gym to get my body in shape for when I had a baby - when I didn't even have dating prospects. People would ask are you married? "Nope." Are you pregnant? "Nope." But eight years later, I finally got there. Despite four hospital visits including landing in one after a hula hoop contest, getting hit by a car, and coming a month early, I delivered a healthy baby and only put on 28 pounds. Honestly I think the kid was just ready to get the hell out of my womb!

I just like to be ready. I don't like to be caught off guard, but if I am, I at least like to have a rehearsed plan of what to do. I've learned to let that go for the most part on vacation, although by the third or fourth day I start twitching if I haven't gotten around to some things that I wanted to do. I am a work in progress.

So this year I thought, why not get ready for Halloween early? I usually wait until a few days before and then get the house ready. We always have a few kids over to go trick or treating and I thought, why not make October Halloween month? So this past Saturday I told my daughter that we'd spend a little time getting the house ready. We went into the basement and pulled out the bins with our items. Nothing scary - just a few sparkly skeleton heads, themed tablecloths - not much. I left the skeleton and pumpkin plates, cups and napkins, the candy jars, grave stones and smoke machine alone. They don't need to come out until closer in. I just wanted to make it a little easier to get ready. But I was excited to share the experience with my daughter.

Everything for me is about giving her memories. We are not big on gifts or toys, but we like things that produce great memories, going to museums or plays, vacations and home memories like painting and decorating for the holidays. So we had a blast putting out items and pulling on cotton to make spider webs. Usually I just hang them in the entry to the dining room but this time I wanted to do the windows in the dining room and living room. We pulled and tacked and taped and the windows looked pretty darn good. We finished by putting fake candles in the haunted house, and sprinkling sparkly black and orange things on the table cloths. Satisfied, I went upstairs to get ready for a birthday party we were going to while I left Parker downstairs to watch TV. I'm upstairs feeling so ahead of the game, singing in the shower when I hear Parker screaming. I run out the shower to see what's going on and she's practically hysterical running up the stairs. I'm like "Parker, what's wrong, what's wrong?!" And she said "Mommy, I'm SCARED of the spider webs!" I thought, "Well I'll be damn - I just spent two hours putting these friggin webs up - with her help, so she KNOWS they're not real - and now she's scared of them?!"

I spent the rest of our time gently guiding her away from the front of the house until we left for the party. For dinner last night we had to convince her to sit in the dining room as she was still afraid. It's now Monday and I am STILL averting her eyes from those two rooms! Let me tell you something - those webs are staying up there until Halloween if it kills me. My mom, who I get it from, is already planning to come up before Thanksgiving to help me get ready for Christmas. So I still have my schedule, but maybe, just maybe, next year Halloween will start a little later!