Thursday, October 30 - Sunday, November 2

I'm combining posts for this entire weekend because it was pretty much nonstop activity, a blur of end-of-fall events. 

Thursday, Greta dressed up in her Halloween costume for school--she was Luke Danes, and two of her friends were Lorelai and Rory (Chilton years). So part of the early morning before school was attempting to create a scruffy beard for Greta; the adhesive one we'd ordered from Amazon didn't work at all, so we created one with a brown eyeliner. We didn't see her again because she went straight from school to a friend's house for a Halloween sleepover, where they watched scary movies.

Lucia had a regular school day and a short XC practice, then came home to get ready for the big States meet in Hershey.

Friday, Lucia left early for school, where she met her team and piled into the vans for Hershey. I picked up Greta from her sleepover. (There was no school on Friday.) Friday morning and early afternoon was spent partly working from home and partly getting ready to leave the pets overnight. 

Greta and two friends, also siblings of Upper School runners headed to Hershey, had made a plan to go trick-or-treating in Hershey, so they came over at 2 so they could all drive togehter in our car. They watched K-Pop Demon Hunters and The Little Mermaid (two of the three are in the middle school musical, The Little Mermaid). We got to Hershey around 5:30pm, went to our hotel so the kids could put their costumes on, and then headed out for trick-or-treating.

We'd gotten a recommendation for a good place to go--a street called Elm Avenue--and it did not disappoint. The Halloween decorations were next-level; these houses made the entire long street a spectacle. Many houses had full-size grocery-store displays of a candy bar called Feastables, along with a life-size cardboard cutout of a man holding a QR code to scan. After seeing this display about five times, and as Greta kept adding full-size Feastables to her bag, Andrew and I scanned the code to see what on earth this was all about. It had real sci-fi vibes. From what we gather, Feastables is a candy company featuring ethically-sourced chocolate. Is this supposed to be a direct rebuke of Hershey, in a neighborhood where many if not most of the residents work at Hershey? Strange all around. An entertaining Halloween.

Meanwhile, as is tradition, Lucia went out to a pre-race pasta dinner with the girls' and boys' teams and coaches. As always, the girls all got extremely dressed up (most wore their Homecoming dresses) and the boys wore running shorts and hoodies.

Afterward, we met other XC parents at Troeg's for dinner, reunited Greta's friends with their parents, and then finally got to the hotel to go to bed.

We were up early on Saturday for the XC meet. The girls ran at 9:30, and we were on the course by 8:30. It was a beautiful day, and the girls did great--they came in 3rd in the state. Excellent work. Lucia got a PR for this course, not an easy thing to do--the kids generally hate this course because it is very very hilly and difficult. We stayed to watch the boys' team run too, and then drove home.

But the day wasn't over! One of the team parents hosted an end-of-season celebration at their house in the evening. They have a beautiful home with a pool they'd keep open and heated to 90 degrees, so all the XC kids swam. It was a fun night. Greta and one of her friends, exhausted, opted to just hang out and watch Yellowjackets at the friend's house.

Amazingly, there was still more weekend. Rach was in town for a few days for a conference, and she was able to come over Sunday night for a little birthday dinner celebration with Beth, Nate, Joe, and Anne. We had a lot of fun. There may have been a dramatic reading of the preface to the Susun S. Weed book, where Susun's ovaries speak to her in a lengthy monologue and direct her to "kill the Maiden" and "give birth to yourself as Crone." Brilliant. I tried to convince Andrew to get prepared foods from Costco since we'd been running around all weekend, but he did not go along with that plan, so he made pulled pork and two apple cakes, and I made sheet-pan mac and cheese. 

And that is a wrap for birthday season, and for this very very busy weekend. It was a pretty great October. If this is Cronehood, I'll take it.