Horrid, er, Happy Halloween!

Well, Halloween has come and gone and with it more valuable lessons in parenting.

Although D. Jr. is 2.1 years old and although he has technically now enjoyed 3 Halloweens on this planet, this was really his “first” Halloween. Correction – this was his first Halloween where I envisioned trick or treating and costume wearing a la the pages of Good Housekeeping.

Guess again!

Halloween was a “daycare day.” Daycare days generally mean that my kid comes home a bit wired and irritable and is ready for bed a couple of hours earlier than he would be on non-daycare days. I should have known better than to try to have an ideal Happy Halloween on a daycare day, but . . .

I really thought it was doable. I had purposely not sent him in costume to daycare thinking that would be too much for him. I overlooked one very important factor, though. I did not count on him eating a ton of junk at daycare, making him much more wired than he usually is on daycare days. This was compounded by the fact that when we got home, D. Sr. and my bro were already handing out candy to kids, so my kid then enjoyed some home candy as well. He quickly became Mr. Hyde all bent out of shape on sugar and clingy and obsessing about more chocolate.

Well, certainly not ideal, I thought, but at least D. Jr. will be motivated to trick or treat to obtain more candy. I got him dressed and got his costume on top of his winter wear. We got his pumpkin pail and were off with the intent of hitting the houses on our cul-de-sac.

And my kid was terrified the entire time.

We literally had to drag him to the first house – our next-door neighbours. They wanted to see his costume – he wanted nothing to do with them. As soon as they opened the door, he started repeatedly saying “bye” and left.

The second house went down in a similar fashion.

The third house was answered by a very old woman. Daniel started bawling in abject fear of her for some reason. She looked at us like we were all crazy.

The fourth house had a guy sitting out front dressed like the grim reaper. We stood there for about 5 minutes before Daniel retrieved candy with Dad. Then he started crying some more.

At that point it was pretty clear it was all over.

We tried one more time unsuccessfully a few minutes later and then just gave up. I decided that I had made it all about my vision and not my kid. I was somehow disappointed that it wasn’t the way I had envisioned, which I had to admit, really didn’t matter. The reality was that all he wanted to do was go home and play cars. The reality is that he’s 2. As I was debating with myself and my kid and my husband on the sidewalk, “Do you want to go home?’ “Do you want to get some chocolate from this house?” and so on, a lady from one of the houses came out to us with a treat bag. She overheard us through her screen door. She was a sweet, older lady with a delightful Scottish brogue and she put the candy right in D. Jr.’s pail and said “Well, it must all be very scary to the wee ones. It’s no surprise he’s scared, luv. Next year!”

And we promptly went home . . . where in throes of guilt I literally allowed my child to eat himself sick – I ended up cleaning vomit at midnight.

Next year, indeed.