Why does my queckery biffle you so?

I is a published author!

Check it out:

IM IN UR PAPER, RAGGING ON UR CITIZENS

Meanwhile, the hunt for a new house intensifies. We have a house of interest (like people the police don't have enough evidence to call "suspects," they call a "person of interest") that we're hopefully going to be making an offer on soon, depending on how the sellers answer a few of our questions.

If things move forward according to plan, I will show y'all some pictures. We're trying not to get too excited so we can walk away if need be, but it's so hard! Especially for me. I'm a big fantasizer. I'm already planning dinner parties (with what friends?) and bathroom renovations (with what money?) and kitchen-garden layouts. In November. So, yeah - reality? Not so high on my list at the moment, clearly.

I finally got off my ass and sent out a shitload of pictures of the little man, so if you haven't checked your e-mail lately, and you feel like watching a 150-picture slideshow and pausing it every three seconds because my subtitles are so damn verbose, please check here.

In response to your inquiries, Nolan was a monkey again this year for Halloween.

The costume from last year still fit (barely), and since this was our first official "trick-or-treat" year, Nolan didn't even have any idea what the holiday was, much less an opinion on what costume he wanted to wear. (Now he's Halloween savvy - just yesterday he told me "Want to wear monkey costume and get more candy!") I'm sure next year we'll be shelling out big bucks for some pre-fab tractor-trailer/car transporter/truck kind of costume (you know I'm not that mom who's going to be able to make my kid's costume) so we recycled the monkey costume while it was still possible.


We walked up our street and back again with another little boy from the neighborhood, Spencer, and his mom Sonya. Spencer was a duck who refused to pull his duck-hood up, and since people were often mistaking Nolan's monkey for a mouse (or occasionally a bear) we called them The Mouse-Monkey and The Angry Duck.

We were the first wave of trick-or-treaters at most houses, which was good, because we moved sooooooo slowly. Any activity undertaken with one toddler is, by its very nature, excruciatingly slow, so when you factor in the combined delay exponent of TWO toddlers and add the confusion of a holiday based on walking around in disguise to people's houses demanding candy, you get a trick-or-treat excursion that starts at 5:15 and ends well after dark.

After each new house's candy acquisition, Nolan would say, "Wanna open it!" and I would tell him to wait until we got home, at which point he could open one piece of candy, and he would reply, "Wanna go home." We managed to convince him to keep going long enough to get a respectable score of candy in his bucket. The biggest hit of the night was a mechanical bat on a string that flew around and around in the air on a neighbor's porch. We spent a good ten minutes at that house, two hypnotized toddlers staring into the dark.

So now we're rationing out the candy one piece at a time for dessert after meals. It will easily last until Christmas, I'm sure, when Nolan can replenish his candy supply, and we'll have to attempt to explain the special weirdness of the traditions surrounding Christmas.

Thanks for reading.