October 2020

Seasons change, finally

The month of Annika’s birthday, some of the TK crew’s birthdays, and Halloween — finally we’re getting some more events to at least mark the passage of time (I mean, how long has it been since March? Four hours, seventy three days, eleventy years, who tf knows). 

The kids and I decorated for Halloween on October 1 — no messing around this year! And we added some cool ghosties to our growing Halloween stash, so that was fun. Then, Lukas’s standing desk finally arrived, so R. and Annika spent half a day putting it together — no more dining table for Lukas, which is especially important because we’ve heard the school district won’t be going back until some indefinite possible date in the spring. Movie nights this month had a heavy dose of the spooky stuff — we finally watched Ghostbusters (which the kids loved), The Nightmare Before Christmas, the 1946 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, etc. — and the days were noticeably shorter, if not much cooler, which lent at least some sense of change from these undifferentiated months. 

Annika turns 13!
The headline event this month was, of course, Annika’s birthday — we now have an official teenager in the house! We had a family party on Friday night, her actual birthday, with her favorite meal (creamy chicken Italiano) and my raspberry-chocolate cake, followed by movie night (her pick, of course). She got art supplies (including a big set of Copic markers), a new pair of Ugg shearling boots, Disney merch (the next best thing to being there), books, a shirt designed by Lukas with foxes on it, a tiny polaroid camera that makes little 2x3” prints, and more. Then, for  her party, instead of the sleepover of the past few years, we had the four usual invitees over for a get-together in the side yard. We specified that it was drop-off only, to avoid “congregating” (aka me and the other moms chattin’ for the duration). Going with a rose-gold theme, each girl had her own chair (covered in rose gold satin) and little table, spaced in a circle six feet apart; we had lots of balloons (helium and regular) and other decor, and got a gorgeous afternoon for our 1.5-hour celebration; the girls had cupcakes and threw darts at a fence wall full of balloons to get their goody-bag items Starbucks gift cards, mini whiteboards, spa masks, etc.). It was a great time, but after everyone had gone, she said, “That was awesome — I’m so exhausted!” lol. 

Life and whatnot
—Lukas and Manir’s Roblox camp: Lukas found a four-week, Tuesday-afternoon Roblox “camp” from the same outlet that did the “camp” this summer, which he started this month. They both had fun and seemed to be learning a lot about how to make their own games.
—We had a couple of in-person meetups: Lukas’s friend Sam invited him to hang out after school one day, so we rode over there — me on my bike, him on his scooter — and met up with Sam, his mom, and his little brother to do a little riding, then Frisbee-playing (till the Frisbee went onto Sam’s roof), then thwacking each other with sticks. We all went to Manir’s birthday get-together in the park across from their house a week before Halloween (all the kids in costumes, everybody in masks); the kids went ham all over the park, and we grownups drank beer and talked about how freaked out we all were about the upcoming election (the group was uniformly pro-Biden). And finally, the kids and I got haircuts at long last; we went over to Vicki’s house masked up and with our hair wet, and sat in her salon chair in her garage, which was open at both ends for air flow-through. I confess this was my doing; I couldn’t stand how rough and scraggly the ends of my hair were after seven months of this, so I finally decided it was worth the risk. R. decided against it, and so he is still growing his fabulous mane, lol.
—General business: I got gum grafts done on my lower front teeth, which is something my dentists have been telling me for 15 years that I’d have to do eventually if I want to keep my original mouth bones. The procedure was easy, but the recovery sucked — nearly a week of liquid-only consumption, significant pain, sleeping propped upright, tiny bites of very soft food for weeks after … ugh. On an only slightly less painful note, we finally got our garage renovation underway; it’s the only project we were semi-ready for that could be done entirely outside, with nobody coming inside (thanks to the portapotty we rented). A giant portable storage box came one morning, and R. and I spent an entire weekend Tetris-ing it up with all the crap that had been in the garage. It was exhausting, but at the end, we got it all, and the renovation could proceed. 

Halloween, baby!
For the longest time, people — including us — were thinking Halloween would be basically a no-go. But then we all reconsidered, and decided that we might could pull it off if we were careful — which is what we did. First, though, R. and I had to go vote in person that morning (the first day of California early voting); it went extremely smoothly and with all possible precautions, and we could see right away that our votes had been recorded. Whew! GO BIDEN!!!!! Then we carved pumpkins: Annika’s was a relatively traditional triangle-eyes guy, Lukas’s was an OC of himself, and mine was a freestyle anime-haired guy. And that afternoon, we got ready to walk through the night demanding small consumables… All of our costumes involved masks: R. was a doctor (scrubs, lab coat, mask), I was Kamala Harris (aka Madam Vice President, with skinny jeans, a brown wig, a blazer, my “We’re all Vice Presidents in the Joe Biden fan club!” from five or six years ago, and of course high-top Chuck Taylors; Lukas was a ninja, and Annika a character from an anime she likes called My Hero Academia (which costume she enjoyed so much, she’s stated she’s now into cosplay and will be making outfits for her other favorites!). We went over to the Marshalls’, per tradition, but nobody went inside; we all gathered on the lawn, then went out trick-or-treating under a glorious full moon (which mostly meant walking up to tables set up in driveways with candy arranged in ready-to-go portions by homeowners who stayed on their own porches (can’t serve communally, so no rooting around in a bowl with bare hands, and no close proximity with people not in your own household). We grownups drank beer with straws stuck up under our masks, which was pretty hilarious, I gotta say. We got started early enough, and left early enough (on account of you can’t really party, these days), that we were back home in time to rustle up a little dinner, then have a movie: The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, again, lol). Staying up late was ok, because it was the night we set back the clocks for daylight savings time. And now, here comes Novemberrrrr....