We had a super fun Halloween! First, my mom and dad are in town. My mom being here isn’t that unusual, but my dad being here is a rare occurrence. He’s not much of a traveler so we usually only get one visit out of him per city. Now that he’s retired we’re going to drag him out to visit us more often, but it was still a fun novelty to have both my parents here for Halloween—the first one they’ve spent with Annalie.

Second, Brenda invited us to come hang out with her crew so we went to the beach.

Trick-or-treating is always more fun with friends, don’t you think? If we’d stayed at home we probably would have gone to the mall and trick-or-treated with Gramaw and Grampaw. I guess that would have been fun in its own way. But when it comes to putting on costumes and begging candy from strangers, I’m a traditionalist. There’s just something about walking down a street at sunset, seeing all the decorations and jack-o-lanterns, ringing doorbells, having people say, “Ooh, aren’t you guys cute! Go ahead and take two, there’s plenty where that came from!” I don’t know if a mall experience could come close.

Hard as it may be to believe considering that Brenda has become one of my closest friends and now holds all the secrets to our house, Troy had not yet met Brenda’s husband Toby, her mom Sue, her sister-in-law Heather, or her nieces Rapunzel and Superchic (not their real names). And Brenda hadn’t met my dad yet, either. We all needed some context.

I’m a big believer in having context. I love to meet my friends’ parents, siblings, co-workers, or anyone from other parts of their lives, just to get another angle on understanding them. Erin is big on the context thing too, and when we visited her and Rocco recently she knew I’d want to see her office at school, meet her mother-in-law Rosie, eat at their favorite pizza joint, and so on. So now when she talks to me about going to Rosie’s house or her office mate Alison, I have mental pictures of what she’s talking about. Context is important.

By now Brenda and I have a decent amount of context on one another’s families. We’re just catching up the rest of our families on each other.

We got there early to beat the crazy California rush-hour traffic…so early that we had time to go to the beach! My mom grew up in California, just a couple of towns over from where Brenda grew up, actually—I originally got hooked on her blog because I recognized the mountains in some of her photos of the Sticks—and she loves the ocean. She will go to the beach at every available opportunity. That’s pretty much how Rapunzel feels about it too, so we all walked down to the beach.

Annalie has a funny relationship with the ocean. Some days she loves it, some days she’s petrified of it, and most days it’s a little of both. Luckily on Halloween with Gramaw and Grampaw there she was mostly okay. She even went climbing on the rocks by some tidepools with Troy and Rapunzel and Grampaw and had a fine old time.

Brenda and I had walked back to the house with Baby Bug and SuperChic by then. We had to make the Halloween-themed dinner. There were mummy hot dogs and zombie brownies. Heather brought fancy homemade caramel apples. There were also sweet-potato oven fries and salad, but those were just regular non-Halloween items.

After that it was finally the time the children had all been waiting for. Time to put on costumes and trick-or-treat, woohoo!

Annalie was so excited about her costume. She kept telling everyone that she was a Japanese girl, even though I kept trying to tell her that her dress was actually Chinese. But our friends who used to live in Japan had sent it to her, so as far as she was concerned it was Japanese. (I guess there’s no reason a Japanese girl couldn’t wear a Chinese dress.) What she was most excited about was that she got to wear some of my make-up. A little eyeliner, a little mascara and lip gloss, and voila! She’s ready to give Daddy a heart attack at suddenly looking like a teenager.

She was also quite happy that she at last owned a parasol. She’s been wanting one of these for ages, and when I told her we could get one for her to carry on Halloween I thought she would faint of happiness.

Of course when it came time to leave for trick-or-treating and I reminded her to not forget her parasol, she looked at me like I was nuts. “I’m not going to carry that with me, Mom. Someone could get hit in the eye!” Ooooh-kay then.

There were lots of dark houses in the neighborhood where we were, but there were plenty of lights on too. The houses where we stopped, the people inside were always glad to see us and often mentioned that they’d hardly had any trick-or-treaters at all. Most people were generous with the candy, and all the girls got plenty of loot. Annalie was ready to go home after about five houses when I told her we couldn’t eat anything till we got back home and Mommy and Daddy checked out her candy, but we convinced her to keep going a while longer. Eventually all the girls were ready to head home.

We ended the evening with candy, caramel apples, and a showing of the new TinkerBell movie, which got a thumbs-up all around. Annalie fell asleep on the drive home after telling us, “This was my most favorite Halloween ever!”

I think she’s told us that about every single Halloween of her life. Which is just as it should be.

These photos and many more are in the photoset Halloween 2008 on Flickr

1: Breakfast on Snail Mountain with friends.

2: Annalie and I made cinnamon-swirl bread the other day. We had some for a snack this morning.

3: I walked past Annalie’s room and saw her curled up on the chair, looking at a book. I love the look on her face, like she’s just read something particularly interesting.

4: She was in the middle of putting her sandals on when I asked her to go stand on the beach so I could take a picture. She didn’t bother to put the other one on.

5: Stained glass? Or melted gummi bears? My mom sent Annalie a little care package which included a bag of Target-brand gummi bears (With Real Fruit Juice!). Apparently, they couldn’t take the summer heat.

6: My coffee and Annalie’s juice in the train dining car this morning. (Resusable coffee-cup sleeve from Anna’s Etsy shop, Life is Good…At the Beach)

I’m taking photos life’s small moments this month for my photoset 30 tiny moments hath September and for the 30 tiny moments group on Flickr.

After an unexpectedly busy weekend (more about that in a bit), we did almost nothing today. I am fighting a summer cold, so sitting around on the couch, watching TV, reading books, drawing with markers were all fine by me. I did think we should leave the house at some point today, though. I asked Annalie a few times if she wanted to go play outside, or go to the coffee shop in our neighborhood with the kids’ play area, but she was happy to stay home. Then I suggested ice cream for dinner, and she thought that was a great idea, so we headed to the Green Mall.

Annalie loves going to the Green Mall. Like many malls in Southern California, it’s open-air. There are raised islands all along the center, planted with flowers or trees or just plain grass, and there are two large tiled fountains at one end. It’s almost like being at the park—a park with a movie theater, a food court, and Macy’s. Annalie loves to walk along the islands’ low walls, and today I remembered to bring pennies to throw in the fountains (the change is gathered and donated to an organization that improves the playgrounds in local parks), so she was having a fabulous time.

After we walked around for a while and tossed all the coins into the fountains, Annalie told me that before we had ice cream, “we should probably eat some healthy food, because you should have healthy food before you have ice cream!” I had to laugh. Here I was offering my kid ice cream for dinner and she was telling me she wanted healthy food?! I reminded her that we had eaten a late-afternoon snack of crackers and cheese and apples, and that the ice cream was really just a delayed dessert. We went to Cold Stone Creamery and she chose a Berry Trinity smoothie, probably one of the healthiest things there. I got a peanut butter & chocolate shake. They were both delicious.

Are you wondering what we did all weekend that made us want to sit at home all day on Monday and then have ice cream for dinner? First, we met another internet person, Sonja from the 7 Days Flickr group and girl with greencard.

I know, I know, it seems like all I do anymore is meet up with internet friends! But you know, when I move to a new town it usually takes me months to make new friends, and thanks to the internet when I moved this time I already knew a half-dozen people around here! Some of them I have not met in person yet, but I am looking forward to doing so. Because I’ve yet to have a bad internet meet-up.

Wait, he was smiling a second before Sonja took that photo, I swear!

We drove up to meet Sonja and her husband and their brand-new baby Noah at their beach hideaway, and other than Noah being a bit fussy and Annalie being wary around Sonja’s husband at first, it was great! We walked to a park near the beach and found a shady place to park the stroller while Annalie ran right over to the playground and began digging in the sand. Sonja and I chatted while she nursed Noah, changed his diaper, nursed him again, tried to get him to sleep, etc. I was very impressed by how calm Sonja stayed throughout, much calmer than I would have been at the same point in Annalie’s newborn days. Though I don’t have quite the same baby-whispering abilities my mom has, I was able to hold Noah for a little while so Sonja could play with my Nikon.

We ended our get-together with lunch at a local burger place. Sonja had claimed their burgers were almost as good as In-N-Out’s, and I have to agree—they were very tasty. And after all his fussing and nursing at the park, Noah was so worn out he slept straight through lunch so his mom and dad could both eat without worrying about dripping ketchup on his head. Wasn’t that sweet of him?

We were saying our good-byes in the parking lot when we realized we had not taken any photos of me and Sonja together, and as Sonja said, if we don’t get a photo it’s like it didn’t happen! Good thing we remembered.

We were not that far from Brenda’s town, and it seemed silly to be that close and not at least call. I called and was told to come on up. I originally had vague plans to be there long enough for dinner, and we ended up leaving at 11 the next morning! In between, we tagged along to the last hour of a 2-year-old’s birthday party, but at least I knew the birthday boy and his mom, so that didn’t feel as awkward as it otherwise might have. We also went to the grocery store, as is our tradition, and I made mashed potatoes while Brenda made the rest of dinner. Due to the party and the grocery run, dinner was rather late, and Brenda’s husband Toby kindly invited us to stay so we wouldn’t have to drive home at night. So we borrowed pajamas and had an impromptu slumber party. After the kids were asleep Brenda and I watched three-fourths of Amelie. In the morning we got doughnuts and lattes and walked to the beach for breakfast.

Photo by secret agent josephine on Flickr

Not a bad way to spend a morning, even if I was wearing the same clothes as the day before.

For more photos of our busy weekend, see my Flickr photostream.