All Hallow’s Eve – Samhain
I’ve been a little behind on posting. Our family was sick. We are better now, I hope. Sammy has a cough again. It seems Sammy has had a cough off and on since he was born, however, so we will see where we end up. But when I say we were sick, I mean covid. I mean putting Sammy in the tub with 104 temp and alternating Tylenol and Ibuprofen and this cycling. I mean him vomiting and coughing. I mean I had trouble breathing and blacking out. I mean even Jeff had to lie down for a few days. It’s funny in a way the first couple of days, I felt pretty good. I turned to Jeff and said, “I’m not going to let this take me. I want to keep working out” (we had just really started getting into a good rhythm) “I want to keep working.” (I was getting ready to start NaNoWriMo and hadn’t told anyone and I thought working with a testing website which has turned into technical difficulties). As we know now, no one beats this, it stops everyone who gets it. Rest is a necessity and as people liked to remind me while I was going through it, I am not so young anymore. I am actually not that old, but apparently old enough to get hit hard with this.
The weekend before Halloween, we were in full celebration mode. I love Halloween. I love costumes and scary movies. I love the history of the holiday and the way the dark side of people comes out. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia around Halloween lately, I point toward the direction of Stranger Things on this one. I enjoy that aspect, a reminder of the goblins of my youth.
Ben had Show Choir that Saturday so we had a Sammy day and took him to Trick or Trees at the Botanical Center. Last year it was at night which was spooky and fun. My favorite events there are at night. The dark gives the place a totally different feel when they use lighting and music for ambiance. It plays off the plants and trees in such a compelling way. With the event during the day, however, they added an element of indoor and outdoor entertainment. They had representatives from places like the zoo and landscapers educating the kids on plant life in different aspects of their environment with a Halloween theme (and treats!). There was a fire juggler, plant trivia stands, a live scarecrow on stilts, and fun photo opportunities. It was a great day at the Botanical Center – we are really enjoying our membership this year!
That evening, Jeff and I were invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Drake Legal Clinic. We had a nice dinner on campus. We apparently scored sitting at the fun table (helped to make it the fun table?) So, we had a pretty great time, laughing and talking with the people around us. It was nice to celebrate a place that helped Jeff when we was first starting out and now he gets to help by partnering with and setting up a new wrongful convictions unit with them.
Sunday morning we carved our pumpkins – they were of course each unique to our personalities and gorgeous in their own right. Then we were off for Sammy’s HitTrax game. If you haven’t seen a HitTrax baseball game it’s a fun experience – it’s like playing a videogame in the batting cages. You hit the baseball, it tracks it, and then sends the runner and fielders into action on the screen. It’s like the golf simulator but with a baseball team playing against another baseball team trying to score runs.
In our area, not our state, just the region we live in, there is something called Beggars’ Night. The night before Halloween is when everyone Trick or Treats and they tell jokes for their candy. I grew up in two different parts of Iowa than this one. Neither of those places did this. We Trick or Treated on Halloween, sans jokes. But here we are, in this strange place, teaching our kids strange traditions. I have to admit it is kind of fun. It got really quirky during covid to yell out the jokes and have the candy come down clever shoots or catapults or whatever odd way people were finding to launch candy across the socially distanced gap. Sunday night our boys dressed up in their homemade costumes. They thought them up. I purchased the materials and Jeff and I put them together. It was a family affair. Coincidentally and totally undiscussed, the boys each separately chose to be Charlie Brown. Sam was Baseball Charlie Brown, from the comic books he’s been reading lately. Ben was Charlie Brown dressed as a ghost for Halloween from the beloved by us, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown movie. We went around our neighborhood with the boys, then Ben went off with a friend while one of Sam’s friends and his mom who is a great friend of mine came to join us for some more neighborhoods in our area. It was a gorgeous night. We were able to walk the streets in sweaters. The houses were so well decorated, some with lights and pumpkins, others like haunted, zombie-infested prisons. It was scary how amazingly well done the latter were. The boys ran along arguing about who had the most candy and who could beat the other to the next doorstep while the parents talked about how beautiful this moment in time was. I wish could have bottled that night up for those kids. I hope it’s one that sticks in their memories.
We parted ways and ate dinner, watched Charlie Brown as is tradition. The kids went to bed with bellies full of candy and heads full of wonderful memories.
But as this post started with illness, so it ends. The morning of Halloween Jeff and I woke up feeling not so great. We both had been feeling like maybe our allergies had been bothering us (it’s fall, all the things are floating in the air!) and we were a bit sore from those workouts, no big deal. Then, people started calling into work sick one after the other, all testing positive for covid. I grabbed the tests from the closet we’d been stockpiling for a while. Jeff and I both tested positive. The boys were negative. They were off to school. We were off to the couch. We felt fine. But that wasn’t the end of that story.
