With the first week of October upon us it won’t be long before Halloween is here. It sneaks up like a boogieman grabbing your ankle from underneath the bed. And if you’re like me, Halloween ALWAYS catches you off guard to the point that every October 31 at 4:00 p.m. you find yourself in the picked-over seasonal aisle of the grocery store frantically trying to snag anything other than sourballs and stale Laffy Taffy to hand out to trick-or-treaters.

Ironically, I’m usually arm-wrestling the last bag of Fun Size Snickers away from some young mother who couldn’t bear to cram her five kids—all under the age of six—into a shopping cart, let alone a car, until Halloween was literally looming. I can usually snatch it away from her when she’s distracted by the CRASH caused by her demon seed scaling a canned pumpkin display.

Hey, we all have to grow up sometime.

I think I already have a reputation for giving out the worst Halloween treats on the block. Once I left a big bowl of Halloween candy on the front porch because we took our own kids trick-o-treating and when we returned the darn thing was still full with a note that simply read, “Seriously?”

I should add that the “treats” we left were teeny, tiny Tootsie Rolls that were so old and hard they could’ve stood in as wooden pegs if you were to build one of those nail-less Craftsman rockers. Not one to waste perfectly gross Halloween candy, I donated my unwanted, leftover Tootsie turds to the local gun club to use as bullets for target practice.

Halloween Wanes…Then Whines, Once You Have Kids

Even though you may have loved Halloween as a kid, it’s one of those weird things that you abandon somewhere in your twenties. It usually gives way to adulthood soon after you graduate from college, or after you survive a Halloween party hangover that would knock a tyrannosaurus rex on its ass. At which time you sincerely (and painfully) proclaim you will NEVER do that again…at least not until New Year’s Eve.

But once you have kids, Halloween returns to your radar as something important. And to up the ante for me personally, I had a Halloween baby. Or rather he was due on Halloween, but ended up arriving on the 15th. (Thank God, because at two weeks early he was already nine pounds.) But that didn’t matter. I had an October kid, which meant Halloween themed birthday parties galore were in my future.

But it didn’t stop with Halloween parties. Being the control freak, obsessive, “We can do this!”, Pollyana weirdo that I am, I decided that Halloween should be a craft now that I had kids. That meant everything about Halloween had to be homemade. Forget the fact that I’m about as good with my hands as a tuna dealing Black Jack. That didn’t matter because now I’m a mom, damn it! According to the Martha Stewarts of the world I needed to step it up.

So to help you feel better about your own shortcomings as a mom, or a human being, as the case may be, I’ve come up with a list of weird, maternal, Halloween stunts I pulled when my kids were little…that I will happily share with you in my next blog post, Halloween Hangover – Part 2. Originally, I had them listed here, but the post got too long, and since we (me included) now all have the attention span of a gnat, I decided to break my long tirade into two posts. Two for the price of one!

But in the mean time, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go battle a mother of twins for the last bag of Nestle’s Crunch at Walmart. I know it’s not Halloween yet, but I want to get an early start on bullying the community for the best Halloween candy. I hear they won’t get their next shipment of the good stuff in until after the 25th. Can you believe that? Geez, if they’d just stop selling Halloween candy starting in August, they wouldn’t run short come October. That’s a perfect example of poor planning, if you ask me.

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Stacy Dymalski is an award winning keynote speaker and stand-up comic who gave up the glamorous life of coach travel, smokey comedy clubs, and heckling drunks for the glamourous life of raising kids (who happen to be bigger hecklers than the drunks). This blog is her new stage.

For more of Stacy’s comedy check out her hilarious book Confessions of a Band Geek Mom available in paperback and on Kindle on Amazon.com.