Everyone Needs Cake™

I'm baking cakes again.

I made cupcakes today, too.

I've hatched a plan to make two specialty cakes a month and deliver them for free within a certain mile radius.

This month I've got a

Halloween Red Velvet Cake with Marshmallow Buttercream and Meringue Ghosts.

Here's a photo that I lifted from the internets. I have no idea where it came from, but I made one like it a year or so ago, and it's awfully cute.

Here's the flyer that I made to advertise the cake baking extravaganza.

I don't ship but I'll put you up for a night if you decide you need to have one.

Everyone Needs Cake™

Happy Halloween!

Some of my favorite photos of Halloweens/costumes past:

Oliver, or Curious George and his friend Tim, or the Man with the Yellow Hat
2007

Sophie and Henry, 1998

Clarke (Clyde), Me (Bonnie) and Audrey (her sweet self), 1979 or 1980

My sister Melissa and I in 1972

Jake From State Farm

So, in case you're not on Facebook, I thought I'd entertain you today with this photo of Oliver dressed for Halloween as Jake from State Farm Insurance Company.  I personally had no idea who Jake actually was until the boys showed me the commercial, but apparently, this costume idea and photo was tweeted by someone at Oliver's school (he takes a Science class at a small independent school) and Jake himself answered the tweet. Or re-tweeted. Or twittered. I evidently have a Twitter account, but I have no idea how to use it.

And, yes, the irony of having a child of mine masquerade as an insurance salesman is not lost on me. It's a beautiful thing.

Happy Halloween, circa 2013

Happy Halloween, circa 1972

Halloween Fixings and the Death of Twinkies

The only way Oliver and I could entice Henry away from the television yesterday afternoon was by appealing to his manly strength.

Only you can drive these stakes into the ground, Henry! we both said.

He obliged.

There was some good-natured banter between them that I was tempted to record as it's so rare these days. There was also the usual bickering.

I took a couple campy shots of Oliver, pretending to be dead in the graveyard. With a black and white filter, they were almost too creepy. The two of us went to Spirit, the grotesque all-things-Halloween store that pops up in our neighborhood once a year. We bought some more spider webs and walked around creeping each other out. There were horrible zombies and spiders that jumped out at you. There were nasty, nasty costumes and entirely inappropriate sexy Halloween costumes. The guy who was stocking the store was creepy, too, and I wondered whether they did background checks on the workers and then wondered why I would think that anyway unless it was true (a psychic hit?). There's so much shit in a Halloween store and so much shit makes me so weary in that bone weary way. Doom.

I sort of hate Halloween, but I cheerfully oblige my children's love of it.

So, Halloween is up chez House of Crazy. I've been for a walk already today and done a lot of housework and paperwork. An old friend sent me a grainy photo of a large group of girls -- a sorority photo -- from our days at UNC. She asked me who the girl to the right of her was, and the name came to me in one instant. I am finding this recall very weird today. Why is it that I can't remember the name of the book I'm reading but was able to look for one moment at this girl's face -- from nearly thirty years ago -- and know it? What the hell is that all about? These are the questions that creep out and try a woman's soul.

Perspective, Part 3,456,782

So, I don't know if any of ya'll get agita (how about that for a southern American/Italian linguistic reference?) when October passes, and your pumpkins are still sitting pristine outside your front door with a tiny perfect persimmon from a neighbor's tree perched on top, but I do. If I told you that I get slightly nervous every single time I pass into and out of my house and see those perfect pumpkins sitting there, would you think less of me? Last year, some vandals miraculously appeared at some point on Halloween and threw our pumpkins, or smashed them in the street, a terrible act for which I was secretly grateful. Seeing as how you all hold me to high moral standards juggling my not inconsiderable problems, would you chastise me for my bourgeois complaint or commiserate? I just can't throw them away. We don't have a compost bin. I will not cut them up and cook them. It's 12/12/12, and the poinsettias are plopped into the pots on either side of the door, clashing horribly with the orange pumpkins.

Reader, please tell me what to do.

And stay tuned for a January post in which I ask for suggestions for what to do with the potted poinsettias. I HATE POINSETTIAS at any other time than Christmas and even then, I'm stretching my tolerance levels to include them in my decor. Oliver insisted.

How to do homework the day after Halloween

Ill-Sorted

I feel a vague unease nearly every single day. Jumbled, confused, unhealthy. I know that it has everything to do with change and unrest, and somewhat to do with Sophie's seizures that creep up and over her two medications. I feel blurry and strong only in my will to push it away, to get through.

Is ill-sorted a word? Is it an adjective or a state of being?

As my boys sorted the grotesque amounts of candy that they got last night, I didn't have to force a smile, as it wasn't that long ago that I'd sat with my own sister on the floor of our living room and gone through the candy, excitedly. It was a long time ago, though. It was several lifetimes, ago, I think -- a time of literal sweetness and utter innocence, a childhood ordered and neat.

I talk with other parents of kids with disabilities, and we nod our heads at this time before, before it happened, before we became who we are. I know at this half-way point in my century, I feel a near-constant yearning, not so much for the past, but for the before. It's a yearning to remember and to feel like that, like I did before. It takes enormous concentration to do otherwise, to be mindful of now, of the present, to be informed by what is. I can sort out the future and feel no fear in the un-knowing, but the present and the past are tangled, both cloying and seductive,  ill-sorted.

Pumpkin Men and Fairies with the requisite nasty dessert

Our house, decorated completely and solely by The Big O

The Big O in his scary Pumpkin Head Scarecrow costume

Henry, the Fairy Princess and Sophie, the Put-Upon

The Pumpkin Scarecrow and The Fairy arguing at our friend's house

The Scary Pumpkin Man and the Fairy Making Up

My trash food contribution to the party

Witchy Women

The other day, I was talking to a friend who spends a good bit of her time cleaning up her eighteen year old daughter's poop, among other things related to her daughter's disability. I talk regularly to my friend Erika, who's wrapping up another prolonged visit to the PICU with her daughter whose Angelman syndrome causes not just seizures, but strange bouts of cyclical vomiting and complications that warrant breathing machines and long, sedated weeks in the hospital. I write ad nauseum of the trials and tribulations of uncontrolled epilepsy in my daughter Sophie, but probably less so of the conflict better known as why sweat the small stuff? You know what I'm talking about -- the mindless aggravations of modern, in my case, urban life -- the traffic, the school situation, the incessant driving around of our children, the agony of it all.

Erika and my other friend roll our eyes, generally, at this regular stuff that consumes our days and those of our regular friends. We don't sweat the small stuff as a rule, until we do. Sometimes, it is the small stuff that breaks the proverbial back, and yesterday as I drove around the city, while the terrible devastation wreaked by hurricane Sandy and my good friend's dying sister occupied my heart, it was the small stuff that occupied my brain and, eventually, drove me to, if not weep, then at least scream.

It was the couple being interviewed on NPR whose faith in the Southern Baptist God informed all of their decisions, including their recent "problem" of whether or not they could afford a new bookcase for their living room.  They also expressed bemusement at why they were so financially successful when others -- even family and friends -- were not. Why the hell were these people being interviewed?

It was the woman yakking on her phone while standing in line at Trader Joe's, who dismissively spoke to the cashier bagging her groceries and flicked her hair around her finger. I sunk to the level of contempt when I looked at her long, skinny legs and her three-inch heels and imagined her going up in a blast of fire and smoke.

It was the crap lying all over the Halloween store and the tortured indecision of my son over what to wear for Halloween. Am I a spoiled brat? he asked, as we left the store. You're a spoiled brat if you complain one tiny little bit for the rest of the day, I said, feeling justified given the 1/2 hour wait on line to pay for the costume, the screams and wails of the Halloween sound system and the haranguing I did with the cashier over the price of the Halloween pumpkin mask that was missing one bobble eye.

So, now it's Halloween, and I'm feeling particularly witchy today. I promise, though, to have some cheerful photos of the children frolicking on our urban streets, collecting candy filled with chemicals while I eat chili and drink wine with my good friend, Cara before heading back home to stand at the door and drop candy into the tiny outstretched arms of neighborhood ghosts and goblins and princesses.

Witchy women sweat the small stuff AND handle the big stuff with guile and cunning and sometimes, rarely, uncommon grace.

Black spiders on white door with white dog

Halloween tchotchke hell abounds.

When we opened the front door this morning, our pumpkins were lying smashed and stomped all over the lawn. Pieces were shoved into the mail slot and seeds lay mushed and strewn on the pathway. It might have been nearly funny if Sophie hadn't had a huge seizure at the breakfast table and we all weren't a bit queasy. I tried to laugh it off with the boys, claiming mischief, as we bent to clean up the mess, but my heart is heavy and anxious. I am resigned to doing the calls -- the doctor, the homeopath, the Lord have mercies -- Sophie is asleep in her bed, not so much resting as plunging into sleep by drug. Abide and ease -- these are the words that echo in my head, weak in their trails.

Halloween is about appearances

and it's what's on the outside that counts.

I made this cake purely for the looks (and got the idea from i am baker). It's a red velvet cake with cream cheese filling and marshmallow fluff frosting and ghosts. It's enough to put one into a diabetic coma, I imagine. But it looks damn good.

In this case, it's what's on the outside that counts, but it's only bones. Click here to get in the spirit.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Domestic quotes and my favorite Charlie Brown line

Someone needs to change Oliver's sheets. It smells like a cat died under there.
Hmmmm -- I wonder who that "someone" is.


Don't put that grape in her mouth. She looks like she's about to have a seizure.


Will you please remove the pile of shoes from the middle of the floor? And pick up your lunchbox from under the table.


Who spit all these pumpkin seed shells on the floor and under the bed?


Why isn't Halloween a national holiday? Easter is.


Has this dog not been fed, yet?


Go pop your head in and check on Sophie.


Is someone going to do our laundry?
Hmmmm--I wonder who that "someone" is.


You need to start wearing cooler shoes, Mom. These are just - uh -- lame.
I wear Birkenstock sandals all summer and then move into the Birkenstock clogs in fall.


Where did all the candy corn go?


I got a rock.

Pumpkin Siblings

Can you guess who carved which pumpkin? The one on the left is throwing up because the knife is stuck in his head. The one on the right is Bob Marley Pumpkin with dreadlocks.