Why?

The screen at the mall claims that pleated jeans are back!

I'd ask what we'd done to deserve this, but we already know what we've done to deserve this.

Taking advantage of fall

ARR and I hit up the Harvest Festival again at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6. It's become a favorite he begs me to wedge in every year now. We got our tiny pumpkin and our numerous crafts, and he got a very impressive Minecraft face painting, and he did several different obstacle courses and took a first try at skateboarding. (Which was not a huge success, partially because he really was too small for the kneepads and they slide off, so he skinned his knee a little.)

Then it was a birthday party at which the parents were the exact right amount of obsessive - enough to be a really cool and impressive homemade birthday party without sliding into Pinterest perfectionism. They transformed one room into a "spooky Minecraft" room mostly through creative application of cardboard boxes and crepe paper, plus turning off the lights. And some inflatable pickaxes. The kids adored it. They also did that Victorian thing where everyone gets the end of their own string and each string has been wound all around the backyard and intertwined with other strings and you have to follow your string through all the twists and knots to find your goody bag. ARR got a little frustrated, but the beauty of it was that as each kid finished, the kids still going had an easier time of it because their string was less tangled. Everyone finished within about five minutes of each other. Well done, other parents!