Riffs On Life

I can't believe it's already November 6th. 25 days to our due date of December 1st but I'm preferring to say baba no2 will arrive "sometime around the first week in December"- it's up to the baby, I don't want to put any pressure on either of us!
Brendan is currently bouncing on the sofa and shouting "where Alma gone?" at the top of his voice. We are reading a couple of books about new babies and talking about it a lot but I can't wait to see what he makes of it. He loves Alma and they play together all the time, but occasionally I'll look around to see him carrying her by her tail or throwing her off the sofa- don't worry about her, she comes right back for more so obviously isn't traumatised by it but I wonder if he'll try to do the same with the baby. Although I hope the baby isn't born with a tail.

Have to write about Halloween. Although I was a little reluctant in the run up, Halloween never having been a big thing in my past, we totally got "into it". I made costumes for Steve and Brendan and they went trick or treating just on our street as daddy and baby dragon. The trick-or-treating thing still baffles me though. Out of about 50 items Brendan received (from about 10 houses- some give little bags with stuff in them) there were only 4 or 5 that I would let him eat. Just out of curiosity I looked up some of the ingredients of the particularly dubious looking sweets and found all sorts of nasty chemicals- who wants to feed petrochemical products to their kids and toxins with suspected links to all sorts of health problems- if people knew what was in their food sometimes euchh! (sorry a bit of a rant) So we have a tub of candy on top of the fridge (some of which even Steve won't eat).
For our part we gave out stickers and some halloween jokes and colouring pages (with a few chocolates for the scary teenagers- I'm a chicken!). They went down really well with most kids- even some older ones. Although Steve did get one group of boys about 10 or 12 years old who said they didn't want stickers, "we just want the sugar!" Steve considered running to the kitchen for some sugar and dumping a handful in each of their (huge) bags. Or just throwing at them. The amount of stuff all the kids were collecting was madness. It's out of control!! :)

Lots of fun though. Can't wait to make more costumes next year!