Livin’ on a Prayer

Bobo wanted to quit trick-or-treating pretty early. He had a yellow sucker in his bag and could see no reason to go on. I mean, if I go home, I can have that sucker now, right?


Also, why oh why does Bobo, when given a choice out of a big bowl of candy by a kindly neighbor, choose Mounds or Almond Joy? Have I not raised him right?

Chuckles got in with a roving group 6-year old boys and ran roughshod over the neighborhood. I (and the spare candy bag and glow sticks) caught up with him a half mile away and made him trick or treat back toward our house so he could go to the neighbors’ (and the house that had a haunted tent on their front lawn that you had to go through to get to the front door).

That haunted tent house was much too scary. For me.

There was a car in the driveway with two mannequins and a red strobe light. Then in the tent there was dim lighting, a smoke and fog machine, chain saw noises, and as you were walking through the part with spooky, murderous mannequins, one of them jumped out screaming at me. With a chainsaw. Scary.

The guy with the chainsaw didn’t jump out and scream at the little ones. He saved that for me. Lucky me.

Snickers…it really does satisfy.

But 11 Fun Size Snickerses (is that the correct plural?) does not satisfy 11 times more. It just leaves me wondering when I can have an egg or some cheese or something with protein.

Also, how many peanut butter cups does it take to equal a serving of peanut butter?

Any candy that had the potential to remove Chuckles’s fillings from his head was confiscated and brought to work. My co-workers’ dental bills are not my problem.

One might wonder why I would even allow a kid who already had 2 fillings eat candy. I asked the dentist how a kid who brushes every day, flosses, and uses fluoride rinse got cavities. The answer was that it appears to be a genetic weakness. Whenever there is a genetic weakness in the children, I blame their father.

Our local utility sent us an energy usage analysis where we were compared to our neighbors (on a per square foot basis) to see our energy usage.  Apparently, there is an entire psychology thing to this…some kind of keeping up with the Joneses thing. My husband and I were quite smug about our exceptionally below average energy consumption (which is higher now that there are people in our home all day and we keep the thermostat up overnight for the child who refuses to cover himself with blankets (name redacted)). I bet back when we were DINKs who kept the thermostat low, practically off during the day, and kept it cold at night, we would have been considered positively miserly. We were the 1% (of lowest energy users).

Because we have a third son coming (soon!) and two already-active boys who show no signs of stopping eating, we “need” a new refrigerator. A bigger fridge. Much bigger. A fridge that is half crisper drawers and can hold 12 pounds of apples per week. Our current fridge is about 10-ish years old and came with the house. It’s about 17 cubic feet. We have a wall on one side of the fridge hole and a counter/cabinet on the other. There is 35-5/8” of room there. We found one 23 cubic foot model that will fit there. And we bought it. It’s pricey, but much cheaper than moving the fridge locale, which is what I was going to do. Expensive tall fridge is cheaper than mini-remodel. And it will save us over $100 a year in electricity. At that rate, it will almost pay for itself by the time it stops working in 15 years. Pay back period. ROI. Buzz Word Bingo. I’m surprised I got the capital outlay approved, but husband is far too smart to argue with pregnant wife. Smart man. Very smart.

On Halloween, I was the room mom (parent, but I have yet to see a dad) for the class party. There were 4 of us. I ended up just taking over because we had an hour and six activities. I am ruthless with a schedule. We finished on time barely…I had some super-short intervals on the CD player for hot pumpkin.

The saddest thing happened at the party. We were doing some Freeze Dancing. I was operating the CD player (Monster Mash, Witch Doctor, Purple People Eater) and would periodically stop it to make sure everyone froze. Two kids weren’t dancing. One said he just didn’t want to. The other was not allowed to dance. I felt bad that we planned a fun activity and the poor kid had to sit out. Had I known we would could have skipped the dancing and done two rounds of hot potato instead. I am going to email the moms for the other two parties and let them know.

As to the title of this post: Ohhhh, we’re half-way there…Whoah, Livin’ on a Prayer. 19.5 weeks down. Only 19.5 weeks to go.