Welcome to the Clubhouse!
We’ve finally reached Halloween in the year 2021! I have been looking forward to spending the holidays with my little family, and this Halloween has been more than enjoyable. I am taking a break from the movie reviews today, but they will be back soon! With today's blog, I intend to let some of you into my everyday life a bit more. All through 2020 and 2021 we’ve been living uneasily with the lingering threat of covid. All though covid has kept us inside and some of our loved ones away, it has also brought us closer together with those people who are essential to our daily lives. We’ve been hunkering down here in our apartment watching Coco Melon and Mickey Mouse Club House on repeat with our lovely little lady.
Eloise is eight and a half months now, and her first holidays are going to be more fun for Tayler and me than they will be for her. I have realized that I get to be the father that introduces her to all of the oddities that our American holidays have to offer. This Halloween is her first real holiday this year, and we showed her what it is all about. We watched horror movies every day of the month, which was a lot harder than I had anticipated. Eloise was able to experience a corn maze, pumpkin cannons, and a petting zoo at Plumper Pumpkin patch here in Oregon. I highly recommend that location. This is the second year we’ve gone there and I am even more pleased with it this time around. The admission price isn’t terrible, and the pumpkins themselves are fairly priced. They also press fresh apple cider, and it’ll go great with a splash of your favorite vodka.
We left carving the pumpkins till the week before Halloween, it seems we carve them too early and they get gross faster than I remember when I was a child. Above will be the photos of our creations, our little pumpkin family, please be kind if you have feedback to give haha. Eloise munched on the guts as we carved our squash into faces. The experience we shared carving pumpkins back in 2020 was very different from that same activity in 2021. Just before Halloween last year we had our first ultrasound and came away with a piece of very startling news. First of all, we were told we were having a boy, secondly, there were signs of down syndrome, those signs being enlarged kidneys. In 2020 we carved our pumpkins quietly, using it as gender reveal for our family; a gender reveal that was wrong.
Carving pumpkins for this Halloween feels almost like it is too good to be true like this beautifully perfect daughter of mine was somehow not meant for me, yet I wouldn’t have it any other way. So Halloween day rolls around and I’m ready, I’ve been watching all the classic movies, drinking cider, and my mouse ears are perched atop my head, but no trick r’ treating for us this year. Ellie is still so young, and covid is still so real. Instead, we visited those who are essential to us, like our parents and closest friends. We may have not come home with a bag full of candy this year, but we did come home with our happy healthy daughter, and that’s as good as it gets. Hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity dog.