We took The Toddler trick-or-treat’ing for the first time this year.
If you want people to give you HANDFULS OF CANDY at each door, I would recommend bringing one of these around with you. There is something about a poofity, squat giraffe that mind-controls people that I JUST HEARD tell the last batch of kids, “Take one or two” into grabbing handfuls of candy and shoving it in her pail. Oh, just take the whole bowl you, Svengali giraffe, you!
Oh, that wasn’t cute enough for you? How’s about some poofity wittle giraffe tushy?
I thought that kid’s Napoleon Dynamite costume was rad, but he was walking with a 15-ish girl wearing Halloween pajamas from Old Navy and her friends who would take the candy and go, “GRAAAACIAS” in the most bored teenager, snarky voice imaginable. Public service announcement: if you are too cool to dress up to go trick or treating, you are too old to be out there. I highly recommend skipping my house. I have a teensy tendency toward sharing my opinion with others. Consider yourself warned.
The thing The Toddler had a really hard time with was WHY SHE COULDN’T JUST COME IN people’s houses.
She was shoving people aside to climb her way through their screen doors – surely, her Spidey Sense was tingling with the sure knowledge that inside these homes were TVs and REMOTES and maybe even things on fire, or partially filled with liquid, or maybe covered in poison or full of rusty nails. Surely, in these houses were computers and laptops and cell phones and stereos that don’t have nearly enough Toddler slobber on them. She was like a dog on point, flushing out the electronics and the potentially fatal. The siren song of any toddler…. that which is NOT HERS.
We only had one “incident” in the entire 15 houses we went to, and that moment was when the strap to her bucket gave way and her candy spilled in a flying cascade out of her bucket and onto the street. And she had a moment, that I haven’t seen other than at the doctor’s office, of sheer PANIC. She flung herself down onto the ground to retrieve her candy, as we helped her.
“OH NO! OH NO! OH NO!” reverbrated through the neigborhood of white paneled houses with matching mailboxes.
“OH NO BUCKET!!!!!”
She held it in her arms the rest of the time, no longer trusting the strap…. and I have to admit, she never said “Twi-ah-tee” any time that anyone could hear her other than us.
But I’ll tell you this, she said, “Tank Too!” at EVERY SINGLE HOUSE and that’s what counts, toots.
And, yes, I totally taught her to cut across people’s lawns.
DUDE! You can’t waste time with sidewalks and streets. Cut across the grass! Cut across the grass!
Time is candy, man.
Time is candy.