Maeve and Lilly

We left costume prep until the last minute again this year. There was not quite as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I expected. We were writing in the studio, so to speak — trying to figure what the costumes were going to be based on what we could find in the picked over racks at the Halloween Express Superstore (TM, I’m sure). We grabbed some fake blood and some fangs and swung over to JoAnne’s Fabrics for a piece of sparkly spiderweb material and called it good.

Lilly (and her friend Sonja, naturally) were vampires. Maeve described herself as “a dead ballerina trick-or-treating.” (I remember it being “a dead zombie cheerleader” but there appears to be some revisionism going on by others in the household.) Wednesday morning I applied blood to Lilly’s fangs and created an oozing scar on Maeve’s forehead for the big Halloween parade at school. Maeve’s scar was apparently so realistic that when she looked in the mirror she claimed she was feeling a little dizzy because it was “so freaky.”

We spun around the neighborhood Friday night, but the chill in the air (hovering just above freezing) exerted more influence over the length of our outing than the allure of more candy. As usual, the girls sorted through their haul and donated a shocking amount of candy to the Great Pumpkin (the legendary spirit that leaves a few dollars in exchange for extra candy to be distributed to less-fortunate children). Maeve was particularly magnanimous, ruthlessly discarding 75% of her take.

We pulled into a parking lot this morning and Maeve observed: “That car is damaged.” Not long after that she asked, “Do purple cars get damaged more?” I dismissed this theory until we all started to notice an uncanny number of purple vehicles that had sustained damage. hmmm…