Halloween

I guess you would call the place I grew up a subdivision. It called itself the Village of Marchwood. It was a suburban housing development. It was pretty nice though. There were a lot of trees and sidewalks for just about every street. The sidewalks are crucial to a successful Halloween, at least for smaller kids. Very few residents opted out of Halloween by turning off their porch lights and generally giving off a stay away vibe. Being in your house to give out candy on Halloween seemed like civic duty. There was definitely none of the car-based trick-or-treating that you have now, where you have to drive a long way between houses just to find one with the lights on. Occasionally parents would drive kids to another neighborhood entirely and let them loose at the entrance. In Marchwood my dad and and Christal's dad would alternate years taking us when we were very small. Then we went with older kids, then by ourselves. I remember one year I was staying with my friend Megan in Westtown and we trick-or-treated in her neighborhood. We were eleven or so, so we went by ourselves.

Good Advice

Stay away from the hospital for as long as you can.

My friend Kim told me this early in my pregnancy. I was in a group of my hippie mom friends, some of whom had given birth in their homes. I had taken a childbirth class, so I knew more or less what to expect, but of course it's different for each person. I've known women who went to a hospital at the first contraction and were told to turn around and go home until the contractions got closer together. I've known women who were admitted to the hospital and strapped to the bed with a drip in their arm for hours before anything really got going. I wanted to avoid that last, if I could. I was all gung ho to have a natural childbirth. I ended up with 16 hours of unmedicated labor and a C-Section anyway. It wasn't horrible though. I didn't feel violated like some of those women in the book did by their C-Sections. The first four or five hours were at home, in my comfy rocking chair in my own favorite raunchy giant t-shirt. That made me a lot less panicky than being at the hospital, on the world's most uncomfortable beds in one of those paper gowns that snap together. We went to the hospital right about when we should have, if we'd waited much longer, we'd might have had to call an ambulance.

Injuries. My daughter is obsessed with injuries. I can only hope that means she's going to be some sort of medical professional. When she falls down or is hurt in anyway, she is more angry than anything else. She reminds me of the Russian mafia; she would pobably like to have all witnesses killed. She's taken to jumping right back up and saying, I'm ok! so that no one will have a chance to express any concern or sympathy or say anything like, "Poor Leah!" She HATES poor Leah. Lately she's been asking my husband and I about the various times we have been injured. My husband has a lot more of these stories to tell since he was a high school football player and just I have always been a cautious sort. Well, cautious but clueless. Some of my injuries have come when I was just walking along, singing a song, enjoying a sunny day, and not looking at the path ahead of me. I've been telling my daughter that story recently. When I was a freshman in college and it was a bright sunny day and I was walking along with an armfull of book and suddenly there was a large bumblebee nearby. I had a visceral reaction to the bumblebee and stumbled sideways off the concrete sidewalk and into a concealed hole in the ground. Fell headlong, threw my books forward and sprained my ankle. More later.
The rest of the story . . . So there I was, sprawled on my then not so considerable belly, trying not to cry. This guy named Andrew came by. I had met him in the greek service organization, APO, Alpha Phi Omega. Since I was allergic to all things Greek, I was creeped out even by APO initiation rituals, which were very mild and normal by Greek standards. I chickened out of joining. I think the only reason I even thought about joing was the same reason most other people thought about joining which was to meet people. But Andrew was pretty nice. So here comes Andrew, the Good Samaratin. He probably joined APO for genuinely altruistic reasons, not because he wanted to meet girls. Anyway, he sees me on the ground, not crying, and he stops to help. I asked him if he would go get Wayne, who I knew to be in the student lounge studying. Wayne told me later that he was sleeping. Wayne had joined APO two years ago, for the same reason most people join, so he knew Andrew. Anyway Andrew goes to get Wayne, Wayne arrives to save me, and I really did start crying at that point. Together he helps me hobble off to Student Health. Twenty-one years later, here we are.

50 Things I'll Never Do

Never be a soldier in a war.
Never skydive
Never bungee jump
Probably never mountainclimb
Never win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Math, Chemistry.
Never go on a Reality Show.
Never be in a Hollywood movie
Never have 19 children like Michelle Duggar
Never quit my job, movie to South America and become an Anthropologist.
Never eat roadkill. (Short of some sort of disaster)
Probably never move back to Pennsylvania.
Probably never be a size 2, 4, 6, 8 . . .
Never have really short hair.
Never dye my hair (short of the witness protection program)
Never get a tatoo
Or a piercing
Take up smoking