November and the Post-Halloween Wrap Up

I'm having a hard time adjusting to November this year. October is my favorite month, full of warm days and crisp nights, pretty leaves and pumpkins all leading up to Halloween. Then BAM! November hits me upside the head. This happens every year so you'd think I'd be used to it by now, but this year seems different. It's cold. And dark. And I'm tired. And now there's the time change again.

I'm sure this November is really no different than previous years and my perceptions are merely a reflection of the fact that my fortieth birthday arrived last Saturday. Yep, hello middle age...and look, you brought midlife crisis with you! How sweet.

Actually I had a great birthday with a delicious chocolate cake with fudge icing and free access to far more Halloween candy than anyone should ever want. One benefit to having a cute toddler is that people truly want to give extra candy to her on Halloween night. I couldn't believe the weight of the candy in Ally's little black plastic treat bucket when we stopped trick or treating Sunday night. She was having a hard time holding it up but she wasn't exactly happy about handing it over to me, either. I don't think it's occurred to Ally that her parents are shamelessly raiding her candy stash when she's not looking. This will be much harder to pull off next year, but until then Ally is blissfully ignorant of any Twix bars or Reese's peanut butter cups that may be missing from her candy bucket.

Ally dressed up as a cowgirl princess for Halloween this year. Or rather I dressed her up as one.

She was very excited about the princess part, but not so much the cowgirl part. I told Ally that she didn't have to be a cowgirl princess, that she could be a princess of the wild west if she wanted to be that instead, and she seemed perfectly fine with this idea. Of course as soon as we started trick or treating people asked if she was a cowgirl princess, which she objected to, but then Ally wisely kept her tongue as soon as the candy started flowing into her treat bucket. By the end of the night you could have called Ally a three-headed vampire alien ghost clown and she would have nodded sweetly as long as you were dumping those little packages of Skittles into her bucket.

Normally we don't have a lot of candy in the house. Most of our sweets tend to be homemade baked goods. Ally gets those little Dumdum suckers at one of the local restaurants and sometimes a couple of marshmallows at home, but not candy bars or chocolate. (No, I hide the chocolate for myself, rotten mother that I am.) Her Halloween stash is the biggest pile of sugar, fat, and artificial flavors and colors that she's ever seen. Thankfully she doesn't seem obsessed with consuming it all at once. Ally may ask for a piece after school, but she's just as likely to ask for some fruit. And if we let her pick out the kind of candy that she wants, Ally is perfectly satisfied with one or two pieces of candy after dinner. This means we're going to have that candy in the house for an awfully long time, or at least until Steve and I eat it all after Ally's gone to bed at night. Oh wait, I hear a Nestle's Crunch bar calling my name right now.

"What was that?"