Yeah, I know. It's September. Don't care; talking about Halloween anyway, because I am VERY excited about it this year. Largely because it's going to be our first time trick-or-treating (last year it was rainy and cold, and our son was sick and seriously did not get the concept of Halloween yet, and I decided there were things I would rather do than drag a cold, not-into-it two-year-old in a wet Batman costume around our neighborhood). Trick-or-treating is the best, and our son is small and can only eat limited quantities of candy, which means: candy corn bonanza for mommy.

Every year I say I am going to dress up, and every year I end up all lazy and oh-right-Halloween-is-tonight, and put on my cat ears and call it a day.

NOT THIS YEAR.

I was going to wait until the day after Halloween and post pictures and leave you all shocked and awed about the spectacularness of the costumes I decided on for the four of us, and then I realized:

We arrived at the mall (in the rain) with a toddler and an infant in tow and a long list of errands that we'd been putting off forever and could be put off no longer, only to discover that we'd forgotten both the stroller (bad) AND the baby carrier (worse). Oh, and diapers. Because apparently we haven't been around this rodeo long enough to remember to triple-check the car for things that we absolutely require to function before departing our home with our children.

But did we tuck our tails beneath our Parent Fail legs and return home? We did not! One run to Target later, we were the owners of both diapers (in two sizes) and a brand-new Snap 'n' Go, which we then assembled on the floor of the mall using my son's Monsters Inc. toys as substitute hammers.

BOOM.

Last Friday night, Kendrick and Indy and I were sitting down to dinner, and I picked up a card that had arrived from Kendrick's aunt and uncle, expecting it to be a "congrats on your new baby" card, and:

Nope.

An anniversary card.

For an anniversary that happened a good two weeks ago, and which did not occur to either of us even a little bit. I mean, not even a whisper of "oh, right: fairly significant annual event on the horizon" entered either of our brains for even a single second.

A few weeks ago, the front panel fell off of one of the drawers in our apartment in San Jose. (I know, this doesn't sound like the start of a very good story. Stay with me, here.) This front panel falling off required me to call the apartment building's landlord, and…you know how some people can best be described as "characters"? This guy. He fixed the drawer in about thirty seconds, and then spent the next hour and a half standing in the doorway of my apartment telling me stories ("Just one more! Promise!") about his Renaissance Faire adventures, with full-on accent and dramatic reenactments and wild gesticulating.

When he finally left, he bowed practically to the floor and called me "my lady" with absolutely no hint of irony.

I loved him.