Thursday, November 11, 2010

Daylight Savings Time

Ok, so "fall back" used to be my favorite day of the year.  As an expert in sleeping, getting an extra hour of it is an amazing gift.  However, this year I realized that since I haven't taught Hudson how to tell time, I will not be receiving this gift.  As a stay at home mom I am on Hudson's schedule, no matter what it is.  He had previously been waking up in the 8 o'clock hour and, while that's still a little early for my liking, I was ok with it.  Now he wakes up in the 7 o'clock hour and it's throwing everything off.  I no longer understand why people get all excited over the extra hour of sleep because everyone with kids doesn't get it.  And a freakin' lot of people have kids.  I like the extra sunlight in the summer too, so why can't it just always be daylight savings time?  Why do we have to toggle back and forth screwing with the equilibrium of people's schedules?  I mean, I was still trying to get over the guilt and shame of contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic by shoving pounds of candy into the hands of a hundred children on Halloween and then this comes and messes things up for me even more.  Needless to say, I am no longer a fan of the "fall back" idea.  But I guess all I can do is try to teach Hudson to tell time by this time next year so maybe I won't feel so jipped and write a bitter blog for who knows how many people to see.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Halloween

Hudson's second Halloween has come and gone.  Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid and I want to create great memories for him to.  The day started with him sleeping until 10, which was more of a great memory for me.  We kinda took it easy in the morning.  I made pancakes and we took our time getting ready.  We had decided a few days earlier to take Hudson to a pumkin patch because, well, that's what we did last year.  I found out that there were two in Chico so we got in the car and headed out.  We got to the first one and it was pretty lame.  There were only like five people there and it was just a field of pick your own pumkins.  I wanted a big 'ol pile of pumkins to take pictures with and a field where the pumkins were all five feet apart was not going to work.  So we drove right on by and decided to go to the second one.  It was even lamer.  There was no one there and once again, it was just a big field.  The only people there were the FFA students selling the pumkins and since we weren't actually going to buy any, it might have been kind of awkward if we had stopped.  So we drove right on by that one too.  I was sad for a few minutes thinking we'd never have pictures of Hudson as an 18 month old at a pumkin patch, but then I got over it.

Hudson was asleep most of this time and when we got home we put him in bed and he continued to sleep until 4 (for those of you getting jealous of my child's sleep patters, let me assure you this is NOT normal).  We had a Halloween party to go to at 5 so I shoved some food down his throat, put him in his adorable scarecrow costume, and out the door we went again.  The party was being thrown by a mom of a friend of Shawn.  It was mostly a family thing but we were invited too.  The house and front yard were all totally decked out in Halloween decorations.  There was this zombie type thing on the lawn and smoke was coming out of its mouth.  Hudson decided this was the scariest thing he had ever seen and, long story short, we left the party about an hour later because he just couldn't get over it.

On our drive back home we noticed there were already a lot of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.  I mentioned to Shawn that I hoped I had enough candy.  When I told him I only bought one bag of 50 lollipops he immediately re-routed us to the nearest grocery store all the while questioning my thought process on only getting one bag of candy.  Whatever.  We finally got home after spending an outrageous $20 on two bags of candy.  But boy did we need them.  We got so many trick-or-treaters and Hudson was so cute every time someone came to the door.  He would say "hi" to everybody and then say "thank you" as they did and then yell "bye bye" as they walked away.  Time after time after time.  He even started to get anxious when no one had come to the door for a few minutes.  It was adorable.  My only problem was that 90% of the trick-or-treaters were teenagers.  I mean, really?  Once you're in high school, and probably even junior high, you should not be trick-or-treating anymore.  Some of the kids weren't even dressed up.  I only gave them my expensive candy because we won't eat it and I wanted to get rid of it.  We ended the night with only about eight pieces of candy left so I guess it turned out to be a win-win for the candy sucking teenagers and I.

All in all, it was a really great day and Hudson had tons of fun.  Though he'll probably be feeling different in 13 years when I won't let him go trick-or-treating.