Mini Milestones

Halloween. One of those days each year that we get out our camera and capture the memories.  We take pictures for the photo albums and scrapbooks, oh wait we don’t have any of those. Seriously ……still working on that issue.

 Anyways, Halloween is usually a big deal at our house. We either have a haunted house or a scary porch full of skeletons, scary music, and fog. My husband and I join the kids in the festivities of pretending to be someone else for the evening. Yet each year, it is the same. We decorate, dress up, hang out with family and friends, and go trick or treating.  We end the night with blistered feet, more candy then we’ll ever let our kids eat, and kids on a sugar high with at least a 24 hour let down.

And although from the outside it all looked the same this year, it really was not. This Halloween had a couple of “mommy moments” I would like to remember. There wasn’t a great big fun party and we didn’t have the coolest costumes ever. There really wasn’t anything significantly different about this year. Not anything I would have probably noticed before. But this Halloween held a few mini milestones for my children.

The eldest, my nine year old, agreed to be Brainy Smurf in lieu of our smurfy theme. However, that was short lived. I guess it’s not so cool to paint yourself blue and wear glasses when you’re nine. So he insisted he wanted to be a Ninja. OK, fine.  We go to the Halloween store to get the Ninja outfit. Now the 4 year old, insists he doesn’t want to be a Smurf either. He is going to be a ninja also. And of course, once he sees that there are swords and knives to go with the ninja costume…..well there really was no competing.  So this was how it came to be that our perfect family costume was ruined….. we now had 2 ninjas, 3 smurfs.

About a week after we bought the ninja costume, the 9 year old tells us he is not going to wear it to school. I was dumbfounded. Every year, there is a parade at school. All of the kids dress up and show off their costumes. Great opportunity for me to take all those pictures I haven’t been taking. Right? After all the questioning and I must say bullying on my part, he wasn’t going to wear his costume to school and the best reason I got was because he didn’t want to change back into his clothes afterwards. Complete laziness, completely in character for him.  Mini milestone #1: No more dressing up for school.

Ready for school on Halloween, no costume.

Remember, the 4 year old was going to dress up like a ninja too. Of course getting a costume like big brother is better than dressing up like a Smurf…..I’m not really quite sure why we didn’t see this coming. The costume he actually picked was a blue Power Ranger Samurai. We tried to tell him it wasn’t a ninja costume but he insisted he was going to be the “blue ninja”. Alrighty then, blue ninja it is. This mom is smart enough to know not to argue with the 4 year old determined to be the “blue ninja” while in a Halloween store full of people. Once he got in the car and put on his mask, I realized that this is the first year this child was actually going to dress up. The first time we tried to dress him up we had this super cool Buzz Lightyear costume. He screamed and kicked and would not let us get that costume near him. That year we had to settle for Lightning McQueen sleeper jammies. Last year, we got him to wear a jester hat but he still would only wear sleeper jammies. Mini milestone #2: Dressing up for Halloween, and not in pajamas. Mini milestone #3: Choosing his own costume.

Our "blue ninja"

So Halloween was bittersweet. Excited that the middle child is finally interested in dressing up but sad that the eldest child is nearing a time when he will not want to dress up. Also realizing that by next year, the youngest will probably be picking his own costume as well.  

But most importantly, I just feel blessed that I had a different set of eyes this year. Maybe these “mini milestones” are things that are not important to others or maybe they are things other mothers would totally remember anyways. All I know is I am fortunate that in the chaos of motherhood, I found some time to notice my children growing up.

The remaining Smurfs