PSoTD

Last night was Trick or Treat in Hampden Township, and the kids had a good ole' time. Funny thing about trick or treating, parents end up carrying for their kids all the masks, hand held items, and other eventually uncomfortable or unwieldy parts of their costumes.

Sooner or later some discount costume maker is going to figure this out, and just put a grab bag of costume items that no longer sell out there together as a new costume - trick or treat parent - which requires the wearer to just carry everything.

Well, our daughter's Halloween Birthday sleepover went as well as such a thing can go. I had ordered Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection and they watched the one true "classic" in the bunch - Night of the Living Dead. This morning's verdict? It was pretty good for being in black and white, but the special effects didn't look like real zombies. Still, they were too scared to watch at a few points where there was screaming.

This leaves 49 more movies to watch - and I'm a sucker for these kinds of movies. I was a Creature Feature regular viewer, and these are just up my alley. I'm hoping that we can have a regular "Creature Feature" night around here and the kids and I will be sharing popcorn for the next year.

Our lives changed for the much better, much richer, with the birth of our daughter. Happy Birthday, C-Monster!

And now, I must prepare myself for the near future screams, giggles, and other carrying-ons when girls have a sleepover birthday party.

Maybe expelling kids would be a bit too much...

Four students at Barre Town Elementary and Middle School will not be expelled, after school officials say they set off a homemade bomb near fields while sports teams were practicing.

The school says the kids copied a video they'd seen on the web site You Tube, and made a bomb out of a 2-liter soda bottle.

The school board will allow the kids to return to the classroom but they will be disciplined.

Police are also investigating the incident.

On the other hand, naming the parents of the kids in the article seems somewhat appropriate to me. Kids can do dumbass things, and will. It seems like a reasonable standard, however, for parents to be able to prevent bombmaking by their kids, particularly in elementary school. And it seems to me that if that reasonable standard isn't met, then it's reasonable to publicly declare who isn't meeting the standard.

My father, like Susie's Dad, passed away about a year ago. Reading her post made me wonder about something. Both my parents are passed now, and I still feel loss in many different ways, but one of the ways is one I never could have expected - a loss of a piece of me, a role I played.

I'm the oldest child, and I guess I didn't really appreciate what that actually meant to me while my parents were alive. At least when they were talking to me, I had the sense that some of what they said was steeped in an expectation of responsibility as the oldest child. This "steeping" starts early, I can hear it in myself when I explain to our daughter that I have different - higher - expectations of her behavior than her brother because she's older. I'm sure I heard that when I was a kid - maybe it just sticks. I can't say I ever heard that as an adult, but perhaps that's the filter that some things went through after a while.

It's not a haunting loss, but it's still a noticeable one, more than a year after I last spoke with my Dad. I wonder if it's common for the oldest child to somehow miss the sense of being the oldest child after parents pass.

Some teenagers, unfortunately, are so stupid that they ought to go to jail on the first offense.

Howard County police say someone has been firing a BB or pellet gun at kids waiting for a school bus in Columbia.

It's happened the past two mornings at the same bus stop. Police believe the culprit is a teenager.

Two children were grazed by pellets. Their injuries weren't serious.

But in addition to that, this is really a case where parental instincts should be tolerated, if not expected. If a parent of a child at that bus stop were to somehow catch a teenager in the act of doing this, and proceeded to kick the living crap out of that teenager, well, it doesn't seem to me to be something that society ought to greatly surprised about.

We're thinking about taking a trip to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland later this fall - late enough that all the leaves will be on the ground. What else is great to take kids to do or see in Cleveland?