This weekend has been a lot of fun! We started our weekend on Thursday, like good Latin Americans that we are, and Jeff and I went to the Haunted Forest with my brother L. and his wife S. I’ve had a fascination with terrifying things since I was a little girl. I remember being scared out of my skin, but still watching vampire movies, or reading Anne Rice books. I think that was the beginning of my horrific sleeping habits. Thursday was not an exception; even though I knew it was “just pretend”, I was very nervous about entering the Forest, but I did it anyway! Jeff and my brother were terribly horrible to S and me, who shrieked so bad that people were scared of our screams. We even started screaming at a guy with a lantern, who was coming our way, but who turned out to be someone who worked there for maintenance I guess… Yes, we were hysterical.
Friday was a crazy day because I was helping in Swan’s classroom party, and Jeff had a business lunch and couldn’t watch the babies. So I took them with me, and everything was O.K. for the first part, until El Cangri started eating doughnuts and his little system had so much sugar that he couldn’t handle himself anymore. He had a temper tantrum of epic proportions, and I’m happy to say I didn’t lose my cool. I let him cry until I took him and Chubbers to the car and he collapsed in his car seat.
I did get to rest a little in the afternoon. The children were extremely excited, and they helped with the last minute decorations and food preparations. I made pumpkin soup and sugar cookies, but we didn’t have dinner until after trick-or-treating. Once my brother and his family finally arrived, we set out to our round of the neighborhood. I was very grateful that El Cangri agreed to wear the outfit I spent weeks making and that he had requested in the first place (in the morning he preferred being a Power Ranger): Max from the classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are.” The night was very pleasant, until it started raining. El Cangri was painfully slow, and he kept asking me, “Are the monsters there? Are the pirates there?” I saw my brother look at the sidewalk for a long time, and then with incredulity in his eyes he asked, “Who’s barefooted?” There were tiny outlines of feet on the pavement. I cringed, and I checked the one kid I hadn’t check before we left the house. El Cangri has a pair of black Crocs that he was supposed to be wearing. He had also been wearing black socks, so from the distance (and being so near-sighted I hadn’t noticed!) it looked like he had his Crocs on, when in reality he was only wearing socks. My poor, poor child!!!! So I decided to turn back home, but we were so slow that not many minutes had passed when Jeff was coming back home with the older kids.
The kids had candy for dinner (Chubbers was like a chain smoker, only it was suckers she kept putting in her mouth as soon as she finished one), and the adults had soup. Jeff and my brother didn’t like it, oh well! Later the babies (all 4 of them including El Cangri and Chubbers, and my brother’s M and baby G) went to bed, and Gorgeous very bravely watched “The Haunted Mansion” with his cousin C. Swan didn’t want to watch a scary show, so Jeff let her watch a funny movie on his computer in her bed. Later, we watched a horror flick Jeff and my brother had rented for the adults. It was one of the “Saw” movies, so terribly gory, bloody, ridiculous scripted, boring. Bah! Jeff fell asleep, and my brother and his family left after we had endured what seemed like 20 hours of severed limbs and predictable dialog.
When I went downstairs to check on the boys, I found them sharing a sleeping bag on the theater room carpet, each clutching a copy of the Book of Mormon. My brother hasn’t been active in the church for years, so his kids don’t know about the BOM, so Gorgeous, as he told me the next day, was trying to be a missionary for his cousin. Isn’t that the sweetest thing? After all the candy, the scary movies, the costumes, and the craziness, there was time for spirituality and tenderness too.