Pertinent to my Interests

It occurred to me yesterday, after posting about our 2023 Halloween season, that some people may find that long list of festive(?) activities discouraging.

Most people probably won’t care, and will just add “way too focused on cemeteries” to their mental list of reasons I am both strange and interesting. But some people (in particular parents of young children) might look at that list and think “ugh, we didn’t even make it to a pumpkin patch this year and I barely remembered to order Halloween costumes in time; Casey is so much better at this than me.”

Casey is not better at this than you. Casey just really likes Halloween and pushed hard on it this year. Casey might not push as hard next year, and that’s okay.

I hate the pressure of annual family traditions, and I think we should all be more okay with skipping traditions, or just quitting the ones that aren’t working for us. This would also give us the freedom to experiment with new traditions without the pressure of doing them every year!

Example: A couple years ago I made gift bags of homemade cookies and treats for our neighbors and neighborhood friends. I did not enjoy doing this, and will not do it again.

This strategy is the whole reason I have a blog. I figured “What the hell, I’ll write in it until it’s not fun anymore but at least it will exist out in the world even if it’s defunct. It can still be a success even if it’s not forever.” And here we are all enjoying my solidly-on-its-way-to-being-defunct blog.

This is an important conversation to have, especially with Christmas coming up. It’s okay to drop traditions and try new ones, or just to do very little. I grew up with divorced parents who weren’t big gift givers and never did the Santa Claus lie; my childhood Christmases were still magical as hell. I promise you that your kids do not need to do or receive All The Things in order to make wonderful Christmas memories.

We had quite the Halloween season around here! Every year it gets a little a little spookier, a little scarier, a little more. It is possible we hit peak Halloween this year.

(Lists are not rankings.)

Scary Movies Watched

1. The Exorcist
   I had somehow never seen The Exorcist before! It was much more vulgar and creepy than I expected, and I’m glad I didn’t let the kids watch it with me.
2. The Shining
   A classic! I watch this one at least once a year, and actually enjoy the spooky setting more than anything else. It is much scarier if you watch it when you are alone in the house.
3. Smile
   This one freaked me out more than I expected it to. Not perfect, but extremely creepy and well done.
4. Children of the Corn
   I had somehow never seen this one; did you know that Linda Hamilton is in it? It was fun to see the 1980s again, but it wasn’t very scary or very good.
5. Crimson Peak
   This was a rewatch for me; I keep circling back to it for some reason. I think it’s the setting and the aesthetic that really appeals. It’s all dark corners and odd angles and red oozing out from everywhere. Also Jessica Chastain is fantastic. I recommend this one.
6. The Nun 2
   This was not good. There was one scene with a cool effect having to do with a magazine rack, but my sister said that was in the trailer anyway. I would skip this even if you liked the first The Nun.
7. Fall of the House of Usher
   This is from Mike Flanagan, the director who has been putting out a new horror series on Netflix every year (previous offerings include Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass). I really enjoy his work, and Fall of the House of Usher did not disappoint, although it was a little more gory than previous series. I might rewatch this one!
8. Halloween Ends
   This movie was weird, and sucked, and I blame my sister for putting it on while she was here.
9. All the Bob’s Burgers Halloween Episodes
   It’s a family tradition! More on this tomorrow.

Spooky Books Read

1. We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter by Rachel Hanel
   I really enjoyed this memoir. The author acknowledges the mingling of death among life in a way that maybe only a gravedigger’s daughter can.
2. The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom & Reid Yalom
   A little dry, but a fun jaunt through various cemeteries across the United States. A good primer on various burial and gravestone traditions, nice pictures.
3. Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry by Livia Bitton-Jackson
   This book was excellent and will stay with me a long time. The author documents her trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1980 to exhume her grandparents and bring their remains back to Israel. It was a perfect snapshot of the Holocaust, Communism & the Iron Curtain, Jewish life and culture, and the goodness of people.

Cemeteries Visited

1. Oakland Cemetery in Saint Paul
   I went on a guided tour of this cemetery with the local historical society in late September. This cemetery is not beautiful, but there are a lot of notable figures from the city’s history buried here and a lot of older graves.
2. Cottage Grove Cemetery in Cottage Grove
   This is a sweet little country cemetery with plenty of older graves and too many children’s graves.
3. Newport Cemetery in Newport
   This cemetery is on a hill, which I thought was unusual and exciting. Also unusual: the number of flowers and trinkets left at the graves in the newer section. I was impressed.
4. Church of St. Peter Historic Cemetery in Mendota
   This is a lovely, well-kept little cemetery with interesting graves old and new.
5. Elmhurst Cemetery in Saint Paul
   This is a gorgeous cemetery! They’ve recently planted a large number of trees so I think the place will become even more stately in the future. I was impressed with how well-kept it was and also the number of visitors there on a Sunday afternoon in October. Would be it wrong to use the words “lively” and “cheerful” to describe a cemetery?
6. Viola Lake Cemetery near Webster, Wisconsin
   I found a very lovely set of monuments here: for a living set of parents and a departed daughter about my age. I waited around wishing the parents would arrive so I could tell them how moving their daughter’s gravestone is, but they didn’t come.
7. United Hebrew Brotherhood Cemetery in Richfield
   I love how closely the graves are crowded together; it feels like a real city of the dead. I also adore the Jewish tradition of leaving rocks and pebbles on the headstones, a reminder that the living exist here as well.

Haunted Experiences Survived

1. Scream Town in Chaska
   We love Scream Town! This was our third year at Scream Town, and although they replaced one of my favorite experiences (Rest in peace, Santa’s Slay) they seem to keep making improvements to everything else and it just gets better and better. I think everyone’s favorite is the Oak Blood Forest. I love how they space the groups out so well so you truly feel like you’re trying to find your way through a haunted forest, and it goes on forever! The vibe is always excellent, and the scare actors and other workers are just great; I cannot say enough nice things about this haunt.
2. Onionhead’s Revenge at the Mall of America
   We happened to be at the Mall of America for dinner one night and decided on a whim to do this new haunt despite the terrible reviews we had read. There were some parts of it that were great! Several of the actors really got up in our faces and creeped us out. There were a few spots in the haunt that were built like mazes, which was fun, and another spot where someone chases you through a bunch of twists and turns. Several of the rooms were really well-done and creepy. I enjoyed this one a lot more than I expected, although being indoors made me feel a little agoraphobic.
3. The Haunted House at my kid’s school
   Of course this was fun! Not at all professional, but my oldest had a blast working as a scare actor and it only took my husband like three days to recover from building and taking it down all in the course of eight hours.
4. Dead End Hayride in Wyoming
   This was our first year doing the Dead End Hayride. Wow. The hayride itself was fun; it was mostly scare actors doing their best to get up in your shit and freak you out. After the hayride you walk through a bunch of haunts of various themes and those were amazing! I was actually a little terrified a few times! It feels way more professional than Scream Town, and they have much better food vendors and common space. I think this is what Scream Town wants to be when it grows up. We all loved Dead End Hayride and will be going back next year.
5. Neighborhood haunted house
   I had heard about an annual, Halloween-night-only haunted house just a few blocks away from us, but had never made it down there to see it. This year we trick-or-treated with a friend who lived nearby so I finally got to experience it. The homeowners basically closed in their wraparound porch with plywood to turn it into a haunted house and this year the theme was clowns. It was actually quite good and we all enjoyed it.

We had the big Halloween event at my kids’ school last week. My husband and I were both on pretty major committees and wow that is not my favorite thing. It was stressful, and I’m glad it’s over. But my oldest got to make his big debut as a scare actor in the haunted house, and my sister flew out to see him and spend the weekend with us and that was wonderful.

Yesterday my youngest got diagnosed with strep throat for the third time this month. He just can’t kick it and I’m starting to really worry about it.

I spent this morning running back and forth between the pharmacy and the urgent care trying to get the right antibiotics for him. I won’t go into the details of our antibiotic drama because it bores me to even think about it, but the important thing is that I succeeded in my quest and we now have a little orange bottle of antibiotic capsules sitting at his spot at the table.

So now I’m thinking about how grateful I am. I am grateful for all the wonderful medical care providers we came in contact with yesterday at urgent care. I am grateful for the pharmacist–working solo last night with a long line of people snaking around the store–who patiently agreed to send a note back to the prescribing doctor asking for a change in the medication.

I am grateful to the pharmacy technician this morning who had to deal with me on three separate occasions but was helpful and kind each time. I am especially grateful to the receptionist at urgent care who took pity on me and brought my message back to the doctor.

I am grateful to that doctor. She had not seen my son the day before, but she was willing to update the prescription without me having to bring my sick kid back for another $280 urgent care visit.

This whole ordeal was really just a long performance of Variations on the Theme of Kindness. I did not deal with a single incompetent person during my quest. Everyone I interacted with was helpful and kind and did their best in a system that is a little bit broken and not easy to navigate.

I kind of hate bloggers who are always finding the good in everything. Do not worry: I definitely did not see the good in this whole process until it was over. I would really prefer to be sitting here with two healthy kids and all my usual notions about how awful people are. But sometimes life hands you a stupid lesson and then you have to hate yourself just a little while you write in your stupid blog about it.

We began fall clean-up at the cabin this past weekend. I raked and piled leaves into a wheelbarrow and then pushed it up the hill and to the back of the property where we dump yard waste. I did this about three billion times. I mowed every blade of grass, and ran the mower out of gas for the season. I emptied the mower bag about six billion times, and had to drag all that up the hill too.

It was hours of moving, bending, lifting, sweating, grousing, and pushing.

I felt fine. I felt strong.

I am grateful that even as a stout person I am strong and healthy and able to do these things. My strength is a privilege just as my good health is a privilege. I am trying to not take it for granted.

My husband took a picture of me this weekend with the kids. This was significant for two reasons:

1. There are not a lot of pictures of me with my kids and he took it without me asking.
2. I hadn’t seen a picture of myself in a while and I was pretty horrified at what I saw.

Guys, I am no longer just adorable and fat, I now qualify as stout. Jeez. (And I am trying to use “fat” and “stout” as neutral terms here. I did not say I was a bad or unworthy or ugly person. So I don’t want to receive any emails or comments being like “But you aren’t fat!” because that will just piss me off.)

But I don’t feel stout! Sure my clothes all fit the same, I definitely haven’t lost weight, but I’ve been hitting the gym hard and I’ve been working on my sugar consumption and vegetable consumption. My arms are jiggly, my belly is jiggly, but I run up and down the stairs in my house with laundry baskets and vacuums all day and don’t feel out of breath. If someone asked me if I was in good shape, I would say yes, right now I am in pretty good shape.

And yet this picture shows a stout, middle-aged lady!

I’m not surprised about the middle-aged part. I’ve heard this is a thing: people look in the mirror and are astounded to see an old person looking back at them. This hasn’t happened to me quite yet although I suppose it will eventually. Although I don’t tend to feel younger than I am; forty feels about right.

Anyway, it’s weird how the way a person feels and the way a person looks can be such a mismatch. I suppose it happens the other way too: someone can look amazing on the outside but feel like absolute shit on the inside. I’m glad that’s not me for now!

But at least now I can brace myself for when our professional family photos come back in a couple weeks.

A memory bubbled up from the depths last week, I can’t figure out why.

Kindergarten. 1990. I had a necklace of rainbow plastic beads with a pink plastic heart in the middle. It seems out of character for me now, but I loved that necklace and wore it to school frequently. The necklace broke one day during recess, an accident.

The beads were tearfully gathered. Mrs. France (“Mrs. France, do the boogie dance!”), the teaching assistant who must have been in her sixties, put the necklace back together for me, but–despite asking me several times if she was doing it correctly–she strung the beads on in the wrong order.

This was not her fault. I told her it was right even though it wasn’t because I was in that long stage of my life during which I could not tell an adult that they were wrong about something. This was the same year that my teacher called me “Cassie” for several months because I could not correct her. The necklace was never quite right after that, but I still wore it.

This sounds like a sad memory, but it’s actually very sweet. What I remember most is how patient Mrs. France was about the whole thing. There’s a tenderness about fixing a small child’s beloved plastic junk jewelry in the middle of your workday. She retired not long after that, and is surely gone by now, but that moment lives on in my mind.

I have probably ten memories total from Kindergarten, and that is one of the clearest.

I was thinking about childhood memories a lot when we went to Disney World earlier this year. I went to Disney World for the first time with my dad in 1994 when I was ten years old, and my clearest memories from that trip are as follows:

1. Picking out a ceramic orca to purchase at Sea World
2. Sitting in front of the TV in the hotel room doing a lice treatment (because my best friend had been diagnosed with lice right after I left on this trip) and eating a massive amount of Hershey’s Kisses
3. My first McDonald’s breakfast experience
4. Haunted Mansion, which was the coolest thing I had ever seen

With the exception of memory number four, these are probably not the memories my dad expected me to collect on that trip.

I spent a lot of time at Disney World this year wondering what exactly my ten-year-old and eight-year-old would remember. We work so hard as parents to provide meaningful traditions and plan amazing trips in hopes that our kids will cherish these core memories for the rest of their lives. But I suspect that instead of remembering the first magical time that they went on Peter Pan’s Flight they actually remember stupid shit like trying to catch lizards at the resort.

We don’t get to curate our kids’ memories the way we might want to, and I hate that. I wish I could go in at night and surgically remove all the memories my children carry of the times I yelled and screamed and was a terrible parent. I wish I could surgically remove my own memories of these occasions as well. In the end, I can only hope that they will have their own Mrs. France in their head, sorting and stringing beads and smiling kindly the whole time.

I spent several hours this morning cleaning out the sink drain in our upstairs bathroom. I just unclogged the bathtub drain last week, and I thought that was a disgusting job but the sink was much worse. There was gunk in there that was at least a decade old. I almost died from the smell.

I am kind of a snob about older houses. Our house was built in 1938, which doesn’t really count as old in our city, but the walls are plaster and the doors are not hollow and I love that. The oak floors have been around long enough to be covered in beige carpeting and then back to wood, and they have the scars to prove it.

But the plumbing. The plumbing. There are days (like today) when brand new plumbing sounds really, really nice.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my youngest has strep throat right now. In an effort to avoid germs, my oldest has been avoiding the youngest as much as possible.

In a surprising gesture of kindness last night, the youngest volunteered to eat dinner alone on the patio and spare his brother the germ exposure of sitting together at the table.

It. Was. Awesome.

My youngest is the messiest eater I have ever met. Despite years of begging him to eat over his plate and use his fork he still leaves the table sticky and the floor full of crumbs after every meal. Cleaning up last night was so much easier! I didn’t even have to sweep or vacuum, and I definitely didn’t have to wipe down his chair!

This might have to be the new dinner strategy. At least until the end of the month.

My youngest has strep throat for the fourth time this year. Due to various poor decisions on my part, he only just got his first dose of antibiotics an hour ago even though he was diagnosed with strep yesterday. He’s been miserable off and on, but mostly he’s been curled up in the basement diligently chugging Gatorade and watching TV.

This seems like a good moment to share the story of his first word.

He was just a baby, almost eight months old, and he had his first ear infection, although we did not know this at the time. Both kids had been sick, both got better, but then the poor baby got worse with horrible fevers around the clock and what must have been a very painful ear. We hadn’t dealt with an ear infection before, so we thought he was just fighting a new virus and decided to let it run its course.

We all lived in misery for about three days before I dragged him to the doctor and got the ear infection diagnosis. About a day later we were back at the doctor with a very rashy baby and a new diagnosis: amoxicillin allergy. A day or two later we were back again, this time with an azithromycin allergy added to his chart.

Keep in mind that in addition to packing us all up for these doctor visits, we also had to wait at the pharmacy for about a billion hours each time we needed new antibiotics. I was absolutely exhausted from caring for the sick baby for days, the baby was miserable even with huge doses of Tylenol and Advil, and my two-year-old was… well, he was two years old! He was a very busy two-year-old with a lot to do and a lot to say, and he was not good at self-entertaining or waiting (although he is good at both of those things now!).

I turned to the tablet for support, and I turned hard. My oldest had constant tablet time for about three days straight: at home, at the doctor’s office, in the car, at the pharmacy, at meals. And what was the only show he would watch at that point in his life?

Bob the Builder.

I can still sing the whole theme song. Bob couldn’t fix how tired I was, but he could make my life a little easier during the day and he did. God bless Bob the Builder.

Near the end of this small odyssey, my youngest was finally starting to feel better; his rash was clearing up and he was cruising around the living room. I was sitting with my coffee watching my two-year-old on his tablet and wondering if I could get away with this parenting style forever when the baby cruised up to the two-year-old, looked at the tablet screen, and proclaimed, “Bob! Bob! Bob!”

“Good job, little baby!” my oldest said.

“Shit,” I said, and I took the tablet away not long after that.