happy halloween -- go phillies

We had a super busy day.

1. Philly's Parade


Because I just did not get my fill of crazy drunken yahoos when they whooped by our house for more than two hours after the game on Wednesday night, we "went" to the Phillies World Series parade this morning. I knew it was a bad idea, but I felt compelled to take the boys since, in an attempt to get Gus to root for the home team (he is still a Red Sox fan. In fact, according to him, they won the World Series), I spent a lot of the playoffs talking about the parade that would take place if the Phillies won. The possibility of a parade did not make Gus root for the Phillies, but it did trigger his memory of this green Saint Patrick's Day Parade trumpet, which I had packed away in a closet. He asked if he could bring his trumpet to the parade and we agreed that if the Phillies won he could take him trumpet and play it at the parade.

And he held me to it. At 9:30 we packed the trumpet and playground supplies and headed East of Broad Street to meet up with Jake and Ellie at Seger. We could have had front row seats for the parade if we had stayed put, but it would have been impossible to keep the kids entertained for three hours, plus I was under the delusion that we would just mossey on up at 11:30. At the playground, Gus performed a pre-parade concert on his trumpet, and then broke it when he grabbed it away from Jake.

By 11:30 Gus was extremely upset about his cracked trumpet, tired, hungry and completely overwhelmed by all the yahoos that were showing up for the parade. I decided to just take the boys home, but how? We found Broad Street closed and blocked by a sea of people, at least 40 bodies deep the length of Broad Street as far as the eye could see. I just pointed the Phil & Ted in and pushed us through ("Excuse me, going home, need to cross Broad, excuse me"). When we got to the front the police said that we could not cross the street and that we would have to stay put, so again we could have had a front row seat, but I felt terrible about cutting in front of all those people who really cared about this so much more than we did, so I insisted that we had to cross (the parade had not even started) and finally they got a sargent to take us across.

The police on the other side would not let us push our way through the equally deep crowd of people on the West side of Broad, so we had to head down to South Street, the only intersection that was still open for emergency vehicles and buses.

On South Street we met this man . . .



working at the instrument shop. He was trying to interact with all the yahoos still making there way to the parade by saying things that just were not funny like, "Do you know who won the World Series?" He kept getting the finger. Gus was drawn to his gitaur playing and showed him the cracked trumpet. And the man was happy to find a fellow music lover and brought us in the shop and gave Gus and Theo slide whistles, which unlike the trumpet, actually sound good.


The boys playing a few blocks from the parade.

And then the impossible happened. We were reunited with Ellie, Max and Meri. We got separated from them East of Broad, but they made it across just before the parade started.




2. Halloween


Jonathan came home early to join us at Linh's annual Halloween party. But somehow I got the time wrong and we showed up an hour late. We still had fun but were exhausted. And since I did not make costumes this year the whole thing was very anti-climatic. I was going to make snowmen costumes for the boys, and then all of a sudden Gus decided he wanted to be a pirate. I was going to make him a pirate costume but then I found this decent one at Old Navy and it cost less then I would have spent on supplies. My mom sent a skunk costume for Theo (thanks, Mum)which was very cute but then Gus decided Theo should be a "boy princess." (His girl friends have entered the princess stage, and no one talks about princes so boy princess, makes sense.) Since we had the Purim get up and the Skunk costume was to light to wear on its own outside, Theo was a prince outside and a skunk inside. We did not even get a picture of Prince Theo. Did I mention that we were exhausted?


I did take a picture of this costume! I had costume envy. Next year I am making costumes.


Skunk Theo (taken at a Liz's halloween party on 10/18)


Candy envy. Theo did not trick-or-treat.