Shabballoween

Yes, we are really good Jews. Instead of going to temple for Shabbat, we went trick-or-treating on a pagan holiday! Yeah baby! Happy Shabballoween to you, too, Tribe Members!

Bambina "Tinkerbell" (and we) had an awesome time. First, we went out with our neighbors who also have little kids. This meant that we started out at 5:15, a ludicrously early time for anyone with kids over the age of 6, but parfait for those of us with une petite fille who is punch drunk with fatigue--and therefore borderline uncontrollable--by 6:30. Not cranky, mind you. I literally (well, figuratively) mean drunk, like silly and loopy.

We went from our neighborhood to Gram and Pop's neighborhood for additional trick or treating. Gram--Oscar winning costume designer that she is--did in fact create Bambina's wished-for oven, microwave and window costumes. Bambina could not have been more delighted. How cool are YOUR grandparents, huh? Some day Bambina will tell her friends, "My Pop loved me so much he dressed up as a double oven--and in his own neighborhood even!"

This year was so much fun because Bambina really now gets it: You dress up as something that makes you feel wonderful. Then you knock on doors and people give you tons of candy. In the dictionary, that is the definition of "fun," if I'm not mistaken. She also really actually enjoys hanging out with the boys across the street. She was just running around like a crazy person with these boys from house to house, and only wanted me to come to the door with her when we reached that obligatory house in the neighborhood where that guy goes balls-out for Halloween. You know, giant spiders, weird sounds, those animatronic witch/corpse bride thingies that activate when you walk by. I know she's scared when she says very loudly and unprompted, "That skeleton not scary to me." Riiight.

So here are some pics, with the usual no-face Bambina. I do this for a reason I may or may not have mentioned previously. But since it's Halloween and you need a little grown-up scare, let me tell you why. I routinely google Bambina and her friends just to make sure they have not popped up on anything public. I have done this ever since (long-time readers may remember) acquaintances from our China trip posted photos of our family on their public website, with our full names and Bambina's adoption information. Their boundaries are obviously far lower than ours, so they perplexedly removed it when I asked them to, not understanding why we wouldn't want to share our joy with the world. So I did my usual googling (post-drama with this family) and found our friend's daughter on a random website dedicated to people with her name. What the people of this site had done was literally lift this little girl's photo from that family's public site and then re-post it on their own--with her full name attached. Now I don't know about you, but the thought of random people taking my daughter's photo and putting it on some website for anyone to see--and I mean anyone, be they a pedophile or what--just makes my blood run cold. So it's not that I don't want YOU to see Bambina. It's just that once I put her photo up here I lose control over what anyone else does with it, and that freaks me out in ways I can't even bring myself to contemplate. So until she's, let's say in college, you will not see her face on this blog. No offense. :)