The Harrowing/Heartwarming Parent Moment of the Week

Trick or Treat and building blanket forts. Two of the staples of childhood and both occurred in our house this week.

Do you remember that nervous build up to Halloween? Will my costume be cool? Will I get lots of candy? Will someone put razorblades in my candy (if you were a child in the 80’s)? Usually, we construct our own costumes. But this year The Hunky Hubby found some on sale and the three boys all got pre-made suits. Sweet Boy#1 was Captain America, Sweet Boy#2 was Mario (complete with hairy mustache), and Sweet Boy#3 was Iron Man. Then Sweet Boy#1 promptly decided that he was too old to be Captain America and loaned out his costume to his cousin and donned his black cape from Grandma Judy and carried around a large stick. He apparently did not realize that Choco, our downstairs neighbor, who is…26 or so, was going as Captain America too. But I think his choice was a good one and Sweet Boy#1 made an awesome wizard/hobbit/ranger person and looked very mysterious. Sweet Boy#3 had really awesome fabric muscles and did a lot of cool karate moves to put them to good use and Sweet Boy#2 had the coolest mustache ever. Everyone was very jealous and when he couldn’t eat, he got to stick it to the steering wheel of our car so that The Hunky Hubby can enjoy the mustache whenever he drives!

And blanket forts! Ah, the beauty of a well done blanket fort. There were several in our house this week. The first one occurred when the Hunky Hubby gave me a reading day so that I could recover from CamasCon. As an introvert, I really enjoy some time hiding from the world after a bunch of social interaction. I left the house and they turned the boys bedroom into a fortress. There were mattresses piled up all over the place and tunnels and blankets and headlamps and pillows and when I came home all the boys told me that they were going to sleep in the fort. Then two of them crawled in bed with me because it wasn’t comfy and then the last one came in because it was creepy to be by himself, so we had a really awesome fort that took up their whole room…that no one slept in. Then the next day they made 2 forts in the living room by piling up all the bedding from…everywhere in the world into two big nests populated with attack peacocks and quail. But after these fierce birds had several arguments in which the attack peacocks were keeping one of the other birds from reading his book, they had to clean up and put their creativity to use in other directions. A good week all around, and much fun was had, although it did require a good deal of clean up.