The Still-Pretty-Great-Pumpkin, or HALLOWEEN: The Next Generation

I remember Halloween pretty fondly from my Upper West Side childhood.

My friends and I used to dress up in home-made costumes -- they were ALWAYS home-made in those days, never store-bought. And we'd trick or treat "for Unicef," shaking our bright orange cardboard boxes -- which I loved putting together the day before, tucking in all the tabs -- chanting in singsong, going from apartment to apartment. (The next day, mom would break open my box and help me count the coins we'd donate.) I had Halloween parties in which my art-loving, ever-creative mom used to "web" a room in our apartment, stringing twine through everything to creative an enormous web. Each string finished off attached to a wooden clothes pin, and each kid at the party got to try to wind that string around the clothes pin and untangle the web. We used to eat candy corn until we got stomach aches. A great time was had by all, and it didn't cost a lot.

But these days, Halloween is big business, the kind of massive consumer-goods-heavy enterprise that makes me think of what one of the PEANUTS gang says about Christmas in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," that it's all run by "an eastern syndicate."

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Their Fred Astaire Moment

The very first time you're exposed to something wonderful in this life, be it the person you fall in love with, or your very first taste of ice cream as a child, I have a name for it. I call it a "Fred Astaire moment."

Back when I was fourteen or so, living through the hormonal and social hell that is eighth grade, I felt alienated from pretty much everyone I knew. My parents could not relate to me, and my middle school classmates had turned on me. It wasn't that they hated me. It was just that they didn't "get" me ... and I didn't "get" them.

I'd always had friends in kindergarten and elementary school, and coasted along with a comfortable social life through sixth grade or so. But in seventh, the girls I used to like, and who used to like me, became a lot more interested in boys... to the exclusion of all else. And the boys in my class I may have been friendly with once upon a time pretty much ignored my existence and paid attention to the girls who were boy-crazy.

Maybe my pubescent hormones hadn't fully kicked in yet, or maybe I was never one for gossip or speculation about the crushes and the rites of teenage physical exploration about which my classmates had suddenly become obsessed. I know I had no interest in shutting out some people because they weren't "cool." But by eight grade, that is what happened to me.

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Avoiding the Kid-Centric Life

Kid-centric parenting has run amuck.

If you don't know what I mean by that, then take a minute and stop and think about the moms (and maybe dads) you know and how much their lives utterly revolve around vehement sideline screaming at Junior's soccer, comparing Ms. Thing's pas-de-chat with that of the other would-be ballerinas at dance class, enrolling the kids in advanced Mandarin lessons and, even when out with adults, talking EXCLUSIVELY about their children.

I'm not against finding the very best school you can for your kids, whether public or private. I don't see anything wrong with a few fun activities after school, or "enrichment" as it's come to be called. Sometimes tutoring is actually called for, when a kid is having a tough time with a subject. And even I have a tough time resisting the impulse to talk shop with other parents when I see them, not to mention write about it on this blog.

BUT there are limits. Or rather, there should be.

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"No I Amen't!"

That's what Thing 1, sick with a cold, vehemently said this morning when his sister inquired if he was going to school with her.

I'm not exactly sure how "No I'm not" somehow became "No I amen't!"

But I can respect the passion.

Still, the big feelings these little people get can overwhelm. And I don't just mean them.

I recall a David Sipress cartoon from the New Yorker in which a father and mother faced their young progeny, and the father addressed the kids thusly: "Your mother and I are feeling overwhelmed, so you'll have to bring yourselves up." (See the cartoon here.)

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Little Boys And Their Violent Toys

Late Blooming Mom is a product of 14 years' (K-4 through 12) Quaker education. At Friends Seminary in Manhattan, if you brought so much as a water pistol to school, you got sent home, and your parents got a talking-to. The Society of Friends (often referred to as Quakers) promote nonviolence and the belief that every person is holy. So playing with toy guns, or light sabers, or pirate sabers, or toy weapons of any kind, is verboten.

Yet little boys like to point plastic weapons -- or even, in my son's case, a rolled up piece of construction paper taped together -- make phaser sounds, and say, "You're dead!"

My little boy did not do this until he saw some other little boy do it at preschool. But now, I have to be the make-believe-play police, and tell him "'Star Wars' is not a good game to play."

At Rosh Hashanah dinner the other night, a good mom friend pointed out, "You have the poster for Star Wars up in your family room!" Yes, we do. But no, we haven't let the kids see it ... not yet.

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Mommy, I Got Uh Ideah!

"Mommy, I got uh ideah!" he tells me at least six times a day. Sometimes it's actually, "Mommy, I got uh good ideah." These ideas usually involve what treat I should bring at afterschool pickup, what TV show we "haven't watched in a long time," some place "I never been," or "where we should go for out dinner."

When Thing 1 mispronounces words, they're so adorably mangled I don't want to correct them (e.g., Wahoo's, a chain of Baja-style Mexican food joints, is invariably pronounced "Woo-Ha's"). And even when he pronounces a new word correctly, it somehow sounds way cuter than it should.

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A Visit To "Both New Yorks"

Thanks to a late Labor Day, summer vacation came late this year.

But we didn't mind because apparently that's when the good weather decided to come to New York City. We flew in on a Tuesday evening, and after the longest wait ever for a rental car and car seats, had an exciting moonlight entrance to the town so nice they named it twice. (Though that's not why this post refers to "both New Yorks;" more on that later.)

The kids were wide-eyed with wonder at the vista of Manhattan lit like a fairytale city, and agog at the midtown tunnel's bright lights. But within just a few minutes of their arrival on the island of my birth, Thing 2 gave up her fight to stay awake, and Thing 1 tried valiantly to stay up in hopes of seeing the exterior of the Plaza Hotel, which he knows is home to Eloise, but didn't quite make it to fifty-ninth and fifth before nodding off too. By the time we parked at the hotel on the Upper West Side, our weary kids were well into dreamland, and all we had to do to get them down for the night was transfer them from car seat to stroller to bed, without bothering to put on their PJs.

But the next morning they were rarin' to go. 

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