Feeling grateful for the lack of a sugar hangover

The best part of having a toddler who could care less about trick-or-treating?

Not having a giant candy stash to gorge yourself on.

On Halloween, Eric and I took Peeper trick-or-treating at Multnomah Village, along with thousands of Elsas and Elmos and elephants. Parking was a zoo and shuffling along in the queue felt a little bit like going through TSA at an airport, but it was actually quite fun.

Peeper seemed a bit shell-shocked (lobster pun—get it?!), so we carried her as we walked the loop on Capitol. She clutched her jack-o-lantern bucket and only emptied it onto the sidewalk a few times. We bumped into friends, including one from high school I haven’t seen in years and who is now a mom. And I loved scoping out the other costumes—imagination fodder for next year?

As always, I overestimated my ability to pull off the elaborate family get-up I had designed in my head. As a result, I whipped together Eric’s shark and had approximately 10 minutes to make myself a very half-assed sea turtle. I spray-painted an aluminum baking dish (like this) in the rain the night before Halloween (although I was pleasantly surprised at the authentic turtle-like texture the raindrops left in the wet paint!) and called it good. It’s progress, though: Last year I made all three of our costumes in the hour before the Halloween party we attended.

It turns out that being a mom to a toddler made me fall in love with Halloween all over again. I enjoyed different things than I did when I was a kid—overindulging in taking too many photos of Peeper instead of eating as much candy as I could before my mom could confiscate it, for example—and even avoided a Mr. Good Bar gut bomb.