It is fitting that, as Hallowe’en approaches, I am looking more and more like a zombie. A zombie with a bit of a bulge around the middle, which doesn’t seem quite right, but still: I’ve got the vacant look and the darkly-circled eyes and the pallor of an old white sheet that’s been washed once too often with dirty grey socks. Throw in some periodic groaning and heaving and much, much lurching and you’ve got the barely-living dead, for sure.

That’s what weeks of nausea and vomiting and, now, many days of anxiety-induced and nausea-aggravated insomnia will do. I am now the walking pregnant dead. Should be good for scaring the children.

Wonderbaby is ready for Hallowe’en, too. She’s going as an extra from the Brady Bunch movie, or HBM-circa-the-mid-seventies, depending upon whether I can get the wig to stay on her head. The thing is, I don’t know what to do with her once I’ve got her costumed. She seems too young for trick-or-treating – and in any case, I’m not keen to get her started on the whole hoarding-candy thing – but she still seems old enough to get into the fun of Hallowe’en.

Last year she went as Sesame Street’s lone burlesque performer. We stayed in and I made her dance, but there was NO CANDY.

So do we just keep her in, helping to open the door and give out treats to the little ghouls and goblins and ninjas and bees who come a-callin’ (in which case, how do we keep her little paws away from all of the candy that the other kids are getting? I’m anal about candy – for her, not for me. I like candy, too much. I know, it’s hypocritical, but whatever) – or what?

Nobody tells me about this stuff. How I am supposed to know what to do?

When did your kids start – or when will they start – trick-or-treating? How do you – will you – negotiate the whole candy thing? Or is Hallowe’en just a big ol’ festival of evil and I should high me to a church and forget all this nonsense?

*(Undying – er, undead – respect if you get the reference of the title of this post.)