A Scary Time of Year

I've always enjoyed Halloween. My husband and I met at a Halloween party, and my birthday is about a week before the 31st, so I get a lot of festive fun at the end of October. I've always enjoyed coming up with unique costumes, something that started in the 5th grade, when I borrowed a neighbor's antique hoop skirt and created a kick ass princess costume that garnered a lot of attention and admiration for my budding artistic skills. It also taught me the necessity of wearing shorts under skirts any time I might inadvertently flash someone, but that's another story.

Over the years, I've fashioned costumes ranging from simple to elaborate. Some of my favorites were the last minute ones, like the year I wasn't planning on going out until a last minute party invitation became irresistable. Instant costume: take an egg and blow it out, crumple up a paper bag into a nest shape, hot glue the egg to the nest and the nest to a barrette, throw on a green tunic and brown tights and voila! You're a tree!

Obviously, I've always had fun with the costume part of Halloween, but since becoming a mother I've had other issues. Halloween can be very scary for kids, and that is something we are dealing with this year. There have been umpteen discussions about different varieties of monsters, and lots of whining about costumes and begging to watch Halloween-themed television shows. We went searching for a costume at a party store and my son reacted to some of the way-too-adult decorations I tried to hustle him past with a catatonic deer-in-the-headlights gaze.

For our family, though, there is an extra level of scary on Halloween. When my son was 18 months old, he had an allergic reaction to a cracker that had traces of peanut butter on it. When your child is diagnosed with a severe food allergy, it's a frightening shift in the level of responsibility for what goes into your child's mouth to realize that every bite of food - heck, even the smell of peanut butter sets off some allergic reactions - is potentially dangerous. My first thought after getting confirmation of his allergy was, "Oh no! Now I'm going to be That Mom! The one who won't let you bring cupcakes to school to celebrate your kid's birthday! The one who pesters you at the party about the ingredients in the cake! Dammit!"

These days, I try to take the kids out trick or treating and enjoy it instead of freaking out. I just never thought that the scariest part of Halloween would be the candy.
____________________

The best place I've found for information and support for the families of children with food allergies is FAAN - The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network.

Soup Weather

Ahhh, fall... my favorite time of the year, and not just because my birthday is coming up! I've always loved fall, and sweaters, and new beginnings, and... soup. Yes, I'm serious. I am a soup lover. My husband might even go so far as to say I have a slight problem with soup. In his meat-and-potatoes view, I'm possibly a soup-a-holic.

There is something about the way fall arrives just after the hottest time of the year, which also happens to be my least favorite season. I'm a sweaty mess for most of August, and it is always a relief to have to dig out a sweatshirt instead of contemplating how much naked flesh I am willing to inflict on my poor defenseless neighbors.

Yesterday was a beautiful day down here on Cape Cod. The temperature hovered around 60 degrees outside, and I decided it was just cold enough to justify making soup. Lately, I've been on a potato-leek kick, so I decided to mix it up a little and make some cheddar broccoli instead. I had picked up a ginormous bag o' frozen organic broccoli florets at B.J.'s on my last trip, so I trundled out to the garage and grabbed a some from the freezer.

I covered them with chicken broth and shook in a bunch of minced dried onions, and left it to simmer. It started smelling good, and pretty quickly the broccoli had thawed and cooked and was falling apart, ready for the next step. I was just about to start dumping in the cheese, when I looked into the pot to give it another stir. Something caught my eye - at least a dozen somethings, actually.

BUGS! Little tiny fruit flies or something, apparently frozen in with the broccoli. Bleah! The more I looked, the more I saw. I scooped out a couple and looked under a toy magnifying glass I dug out of the toy chest to make sure I wasn't looking at discolored broccoli buds. Nope, BUGS.

No soup for me, people. Luckily, it is time for another one of my fall favorites to appear in the store again - Honeycrisp apples. One of the very first blog posts I ever wrote was an ode to the Honeycrisp apple, and my ardent passion for this particular variety has not waned in the last two years. I have been known to (gulp) order them on-line from an orchard in NY state, and they get delivered in their own little individual foam cradles.

The funniest thing about these odd passions for certain foods is how they get passed down to the kids. The soup thing is apparently skipping a generation, because I can't get either kid to willing eat any kind of soup. The Honeycrisp thing, however, has become just as much of a passion for my daughter as it is for me. When I brought home the groceries last week and was putting them away, I said to her, "Guess what time of the year it is?" Not even a heartbeat passed before she yelped, "HONEYCRISP! WHERE ARE THEY?!?" and came storming into the kitchen to search them out.

Sigh. I'm so proud.