Good and Bad Children
By Robert Louis Stevenson
Children, you are very little,
And your bones are very brittle;
If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.
You must still be bright and quiet,
And content with simple diet;
And remain, through all bewild'ring,
Innocent and honest children.
Happy hearts and happy faces,
Happy play in grassy places--
That was how in ancient ages,
Children grew to kings and sages.
But the unkind and the unruly,
And the sort who eat unduly,
They must never hope for glory--
Theirs is quite a different story!
Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.
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All day Wednesday I had young guys in tight shirts in my house. Unfortunately the reason they were here was to put my house back together and neither spoke much English. The good news is that there is now a cabinet in my kids' bathroom again (which is actually much nicer than the one that got ruined in the flood) and instead of a hole there is a mismatched piece of drywall in the living room ceiling. The bad news is that there were hammers and drills and scrapers and some knife-cutting-drywall thing that was worse than fingers on a chalkboard.
But things are progressing, if more slowly and at greater expense than we had hoped, and the guys left around dinnertime so we could eat a modified Dia de los Muertos feast (all right, mostly this was an excuse for Mexican food) and then get ready for trick-or-treating. The kids both wore heavy capes and scary masks and gloves; I wore a much flimsier cape and a big lacy blouse and black velvet skirt and witch hat (which did not stay on long, as it made my head sweat). We had fewer visitors than last year but still a good number, and the kids came home with an absolutely terrifying collection of junk, of which my favorite items were 150-calorie packs of Wheat Thins. (Well, those were what I admired the most; my favorite items were the Almond Joys!)
Our jack-o-lanters on the front stoop...
...and the tea light glowing in the candle holder to show kids where the edge of the steps are...
...cannot compete with some of the more impressively carved pumpkins in the neighborhood.
There are neighbors who celebrate the Day of the Dead...
...and neighbors who just enjoy tissue paper ghosts in their trees.
And here I am, in my fancy Spider Woman cape since I had to loan older son my heavy velvet one to trick-or-treat in.
Once again, my handsome sons!
I had a somewhat hectic viewing of Pushing Daisies due to the knocking at the door, but I did manage to enjoy it enormously anyway.
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