Every time Carter passes a major milestone or has some new experience, I appreciate my parents even more. This isn’t out of some, “Gosh, I owe them so much” sort of sepia-tone nostalgia, but rather a simple realization of what a colossal pain in the ass it is dealing with a 2-year-old in these situations. Basically, I respect them for not leaving me on a curb somewhere and never looking back.

This year was Carter’s third Halloween, but the first where he actually understood that it meant dressing up and getting free candy. I’m not exaggerating when I say he was stoked, to the point where we had to convince him each morning for a week that it wasn’t Halloween yet, and that there weren’t going to be people handing out Skittles on the streets. We signed up for four separate parties (city kids don’t get to wander door-to-door like I did back in small town Indiana), and put together two different costumes, a store bought Spiderman suit and an improvised Bob the Builder getup, complete with tools and a hard hat.

Debbie and I thought the first event at the Little Gym, where he goes for an hour of expensive, semi-organized horsing around each week, would go over well because he would be familiar with the surroundings. Unfortunately the trainee who signed us up didn’t tell us that the party was for the older classes, and that most parents would be dropping their kids off and leaving. Since we’d spent the time and effort wrestling him into his Spidey suit, Debbie and I decided to stay through the free play time, while Carter was being terrorized by gangly pre-teen boys and an eight-ish girl in a scarily lifelike skeleton costume. “I wanna go home,” he told us through a mouthful of tear-snot and pretzels, so we left and had dinner at the Mexican restaurant down the street. The night wasn’t a complete loss; Carter had guacamole and flirted with waitresses in his costume, while Debbie and I had margaritas and talked soccer with the horn player from the mariachi band.

The next morning, Carter informed us that he didn’t want to go to any more Halloween, so we bagged the next two parties, deciding we’d traumatized him enough already. But we couldn’t really avoid tonight’s neighborhood potluck in our complex’s courtyard. It was fun last year, and besides, he’d know most of the kids anyway.

We got him sufficiently excited about more candy, and he suited up as a Claymation general contractor. Things started off well enough; he made the rounds, filled up his plastic pumpkin, and stood still for some decent grandma-pleasing pictures. Then, as he was picking through a bucket of candy, one of the neighbor kids dressed as Chewbacca reached in behind him. Carter turned to see who it was, then started shreiking, shaking, and literally climbed up my leg. He latched onto my neck like a baby orangutan, and no amount of chocolate could make him let go. He ran inside and hid behind Bootsy, peeking out through the front window, squealing any time Chewbacca came within 20 feet.

Of course, it didn’t help that the little fucker knew he was scaring him and kept coming back on purpose, or that his parents couldn’t be bothered to tell him to knock it off. Debbie and I tried to reassure Carter that it was just a costume, but he wasn’t having any of it. We convinced him to come with us out the back door to go for a walk with Bootsy, then when we got back I set a bucket of candy on our porch, scowled in the general direction of my neighbor’s, and went inside.

I don’t remember loving or hating Halloween when I was a kid. I’m sure I liked the candy just as much as anyone, but I also don’t think I was that crazy about getting dressed up and knocking on doors either. My fondest memories of Halloween actually come from high school, when my friends and I spent the month of October thinking of ways to sneak out of the house to go T.P.-ing. If Carter decides he doesn’t like Halloween, I think I can live with it. When he’s old enough, I’ll teach him the subtle difference between soaping a window with Ivory and Zest, and the proper way to chuck a roll of Charmin over a tree so that it strings all the way to the ground. I know just the place to practice.