Daddy Plays Bass: Halloween!

I feel I'm on the cusp of something. In a very literal sense, tomorrow is November 1st, and November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Last year, I wrote The Rapscallions during my first NaNo. (And incidentally, I learned that it is going to be the featured book this December at a book club in Missouri!) I feel compelled to participate again, but not at all in the same way. Last year, I had an infant who slept about 20 hours a day. She's down to about 12 now, most of which (usually) occur between 8 PM and 6 AM, with a two hour nap sometime during the day. So instead of stopping what I'm doing to feed her, change her, and put her back to bed, the times are reversed. Most of my time is spent directly interacting with her --

taking her places,

playing games,

exploring bookshelves,

feeding her a dazzling array of foods,

making funny faces,

going to the library,

taking walks --

and the time I get to do 'my stuff' is limited to that two hour nap. [I have to admit, I relish that time, and I wonder how parents of more than one kid do it. (I've yet to hear of someone whose kids both take naps at the same time consistently.)]
As I said, I'm on the cusp of something. For the past two months, the first two months of the school year, when I'm back to being alone with Esme every weekday, I've been insanely busy. To pull in some extra income, I've been designing elementary-level project based unit plans for a local consortium of schools. I've written nine of them, which, ask any teacher, is many hours of work. I've also been writing post-session reports for Growing Hope to comply with grant funding requirements, so you can imagine the detail -- or maybe you can't. I certainly didn't. But I'm almost finished with both projects, so I have a sense of my time being mine again. Which coincides nicely with NaNo.
I've already decided on my NaNo writing for this year -- I'm going to continue working on Ride Collector, my book about hitchhiking from Maine to Mississippi in late summer of 1993. Unfortunately, that violates two NaNo rules: 1) you have to start a new work in November (I already have almost 7,000 words) and 2) it has to be fiction, a novel. Now there may be fictionalized sections, as I can't remember every one of those 25 rides, but it's still a memoir, not a novel. I decided that didn't matter, since I'm not going to write 50,000 words this month, either. I simply won't have the time. Instead, I'm going to use NaNo to reawaken my muse. With all the focus on getting work done in the time I have to do it, I haven't done much else. No new songs written for Bowling Green. No new writing on any of my book ideas. No new writing on my blog. That all changes starting right now!

Which brings me to the point of this post. (Ha! You thought I'd forgotten the title, hadn't you?) Tonight was Esme's first Halloween in a costume. (Tinkerbell, if you must know. Pictures may follow if they turned out on Zoey's phone.) She was definitely super excited to see what all these kids were doing coming up to our door. She wanted to go outside and cavort with them, but it being only about 35 or 40 out, we didn't let her stay out long (and you could barely see her little wings sticking out the neck of her coat). I think the big story of this Halloween, though, was our pumpkins. On a sunny afternoon last week, when it was in the 70's, we all sat outside and carved our pumpkins -- one small one I grew in the garden, and one big one we bought. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bit too premature.