Well. I’m sure you will all be relieved to know that Caroline’s fangs managed to survive until Halloween.
But I bought her and her friend a pair of wax fangs as a back up plan.
They were genuinely surprised that the wax fangs didn’t taste good. And I wasn’t genuinely surprised that I found wax fang remnants on my coffee table the next morning.
We had a fun Halloween. Nothing special, just the usual handing out candy and trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. I counted at least 463 Elsas before Let It Go became imbedded in my subconscious yet again.
After we handed out candy for a while, P and I followed Caroline and her friend as they made their way to all the houses on our street. Then we came to a house with a big poster board sign declaring it had a “Haunted House” and so I told P, “Go with the girls into this Haunted House! It will be fun!”
My reasons for this were two-fold:
1. I figured it was a homemade haunted house in someone’s garage. How scary could it be?
2. I can barely walk into Party City during Halloween season and cannot tolerate any type of haunted house, no matter how lame it may be, so it made sense to send P in with them.
As it turns out, it was a little more intense than what I envisioned. I thought it was going to be one of those things where you put your hand in a shoebox and think you’re feeling brains or intestines or something. Perhaps there would be a scary witch in the corner in a rocking chair. Maybe, MAYBE, a freaky clown. I guess my assumptions were based on the fact that I’m a child of the 70’s and that’s about as scary as it came in my childhood. Or at least as scary as I was allowed to see given that the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz flat freaked me out.
But I could tell by the way the girls were hanging on to P’s arm as they came walking out of the haunted house that this had been a little more serious. Apparently there was a chainsaw. And Michael Myers. And someone dressed as a girl from some horror movie that I obviously never saw. And maybe someone rolled what looked like a human head at them as they left.
Please let me know if you’d like to see a photo of my trophy for Mother of the Year.
The good news is they only seemed to be temporarily traumatized and then began to build it into the greatest adventure of their young lives as we made our way to the other houses on the street. Meanwhile, I was mentally composing a text apology to Caroline’s friend’s mother.
By the time we made it back to our house about forty-five minutes later, they declared the whole night a huge success as they sorted all their candy on the living room floor and were telling and re-telling about all the excitement of the haunted house. P even took Caroline down to the house again after her friend left because they wanted to get the story of how they made such a great haunted house out of what appeared to be an ordinary garage.
Thankfully, her friend went home with glowing reviews of the whole night and reported she “LOVED” the haunted house and so my apology was met with a gracious, “Are you kidding? She loved it!” I guess I was projecting my own haunted house issues onto the situation.
But my favorite part was later that night as Caroline, P and I sat on the couch while she breathlessly replayed every single detail of the haunted house adventure and finished with, “And I felt so bad for R because she wanted to run but couldn’t because of her giant shoes!”
You can see where they might be problematic if you find yourself needing to make a fast getaway.