Halloween in August

Yup, the title isn’t a misprint. We had Halloween on the first day of August this year. It’s actually a tradition at this point. Every year my mother has a Halloween party during the summer, reason being that it’s great for the kids to get out and play games and not have to worry about the rain and the cold. Obviously, it rains every year but it’s still great fun.

There is always water balloons, whipped cream pies, eggs and the like being thrown around. This year there was a new addition when Biff filled one of his sons nappies with chocolate gloop and rubbed it in my nieces face. There was a look of pure terror, followed by the nappy, followed by relief when she realized that it wasn’t baby poop.

Time and a lack of imagination led to the boys being dressed as football players but they enjoyed it much more than last year. They didn’t enjoy when my brother filled a rubber mask with whipped cream for a can and pulled it down on my head. Nice guy that he is, he did it while I was holding Monkey Boy and feeling invulnerable [who pulls a prank on someone holding a baby? Too cruel!]. Monkey Boy took one look at my new visage and shook the windows with his screams. He wasn’t much happier when I took it off and had a halo of whipped cream. As an aside, I don’t know how people eat that stuff, I couldn’t get the smell out of my nostrils for the rest of the day.

After we left the Halloween party, we went back to my mother-in-laws for a while. She has a large trampoline in the back garden which the boys are only getting around to liking. Well, one of them likes it. Monkey Boy likes the idea of it and will ask you to put him up on it but if his cousins are up there already and bouncing around then he will take one tentative step forward and then run back into your arms. Fat Chops is a different story. He is perfectly willing to abandon himself and just bounce along with the momentum that his cousins generate. He has finally got the hang of jumping [I love when kids think they are jumping and they squat down, then straighten up and throw their arms up to help them jump higher while their feet remain rooted to the ground] but landing is another days work. He leaps, salmon-like, into the air but can’t get his feet back under himself so he just lands on his bum. Fine on a trampoline but it’s a challenge to be straight faced and sympathetic when he does it in the living room. He has no chance of a straight face when he stands up looking aggrieved and gesturing for you to rub and kiss his bum.

Highlight of the bank holiday weekend was the boy sleeping until 9.30 on Sunday morning. It would have been better if I hadn’t habitually woken at 7.30 wondering why they were still quiet, then dozed off, then woken again about an hour later and dozing off before waking at 9.30 and deciding that something must be wrong and rushing in to the room to make sure they were still breathing.

Fight of the week was also on Sunday morning. The boys were playing on the deck while myself and Hannah had a coffee and read in the sun room. After a couple of minutes quiet I decided I should stick my head out and see what was happening – it’s slow going but I’m learning! I saw Fat Chops with his hands in a flower pot and shouted at him to stop what he was doing. He ran over and stood beside me and then started shouting at Monkey Boy to show me that he was on my side and strongly disapproved of putting his hands in the pot. Piecing it together from the shreds of evidence available it looked like MB had taken a couple of handfuls of muck and thrown them over FC [MB had dirty hands and FC was covered in muck, circumstantial evidence but I know them well enough to make the assumption]. Obviously, I had interrupted Fat Chops as he was about to get his own back so he decided to take the high moral ground and berate Monkey Boy for the terrible crime of throwing muck that FC himself would never lower himself to partaking in.