But there are little bright spots as usual, and a moment on Friday that made me grateful. I will admit that I was nervous about the 6-year-old’s parent-teacher conference. I don’t want to write too much about specifics as my kids get older but longtime readers know that he is…spirited. This plays out in various predictable ways. There had been a disciplinary incident on Thursday night at one of his activities that had me quite upset.

Anyway…his first grade teacher, bless her, is a wonderful person who has her methods for dealing with 6-year-olds (for instance, she hands out sheets of scented stickers like they’re candy on Halloween). She told us that he was a joy to have in class, and such a sweet boy, and that he had told her he was nervous about the conference (!) but she said he shouldn’t be because he was doing a good job.

Cue me finally exhaling. I then remembered that he had told me he had put something for me in his desk.

So we all went to look and this little sticky note is what I found. He is a sweet little boy. I left him a note too!

The leaves are pretty close to peak around here. A few weekend highlights: I took the 12-year-old out for a sushi lunch on Friday (the kids had a half day)….and then took a nap to recover from my ridiculous Thursday night O’Hare-plus-hotel experience. I ran 6 miles with Jane along a river trail on Saturday morning. We went for a family walk along a trail and through a local cemetery. We went to Dutch Wonderland’s Halloween event on Sunday. This little amusement park in Lancaster isn’t exactly Disney World, but the kids had a surprisingly good time. I think it helped that it wasn’t crowded so they could go on whatever rides they wanted whenever they wanted.

And, finally, trick-or-treating! We had a vampire, an inflatable dinosaur, another vampire, a ninja, and an adorable little lion. The dog pretty much refused to wear his pumpkin costume, so that was that. We did two local neighborhoods where the houses are close together and the streets quiet. Some people went all out, though I was surprised at the number of houses that put a bowl of candy outside rather than have kids ring the doorbell. We tend to do this — because we are out and about with our own kids — but we’re talking houses that had done fairly elaborate get-ups in the past. Maybe this is the new post-Covid world, where people look for ways to limit interaction.

Now it is November. This always happens the day after Halloween, though it seems to sneak up on me nonetheless. I think November is an under-rated month, with the leaves at their peak at the start, and the month ending in a cozy holiday vibe. Unfortunately, it’s also going to start getting pretty cold. And I will just be cold again until May….