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It occurs to me that a lot of stuff happened in October that I didn’t write about here. Nothing life-altering, but events that would normally go here if I had time to write about them. I was frustrated by my lack of down time, but it’s good in a way that I wasn’t able to document anything. I was too busy living.

So, back at the beginning of the month, Frank got married. I didn’t take any pictures of that, but I did take a grand total of two at the rehearsal dinner.

There’s the bride and groom, a large centerpiece, and the best man. I believe I took this during the father of the bride’s “toast,” which was more of an undulating monologue about his job and his recent birthday and I think snails or something. After meeting Andrea’s dad, the picture that she had shown me of him in which he had fallen asleep while repairing the kitchen sink suddenly made perfect sense.

The next weekend, my cousin Jeffrey got married. The ceremony was at Heinz Chapel on the University of Pittsburgh campus.

Yes, I’m wearing the same dress that I wore to Frank’s wedding. It’s my new October Wedding Uniform.

I had never been inside Heinz Chapel before. It is indeed gorgeous. But I found that my attention span during Catholic masses is approximately the same as it was when I was six. I kept staring at the stained-glass windows and going, “Mom, look. Look. Look at those stairs! Mooooommm!” And then Jeffrey and Kristy were married.

Newton’s like, “Tsk! Stupid apple done messed up my coiffure!”

Their reception was in the Carnegie Museum Music Hall, which is also insanely gorgeous.

Carnegie may have been kind of a jerk, but he had awesome taste.

The next day, we celebrated my mom and grandfather’s birthdays.

My kid is so sweet.

The weekend after that, our friends Jwan and Karen got married.

It was a really nice time. Our group of friends doesn’t have a chance to get together that much anymore and the wedding was really casual so we spent most of the evening talking, drinking, and dancing. Afterward, we went to Jwan and Karen’s house were things got progressively sloppy.

That’s Jwan’s brother on the right, who is a very nice guy, but also very blunt. Late in the evening, he sat down next to me and explained that he could tell I was, “kind of insane.”

Tiny dogs attacked the husband and not long after this, said husband had some, er, digestive issues and we had to leave abruptly, though our buddy Alison protested vehemently. The sister-in-law and her boyfriend had to chase our car down the street. It was all very goofy.

Then there was another weekend, and I know we had some kind of social obligation but I can’t remember what it was at all. We also went roller skating. And I think this was the weekend that we made our annual trip to Trax Farms. I forgot to bring my camera so I don’t have any adorable pictures of my kid frolicking in a pile of pumpkins. I’m pretty sure that means my mommyblogger membership is revoked. However, Michelle was there at the same time and she took pictures of her cute kid. So I’ll just piggyback on to her post and say, “Yeah, us too. Also: petting goats.” I also forgot cash so we couldn’t buy a cup of feed to give to the animals in the petting zoo. We kicked it old school and just petted (is that the proper conjugation?) the animals. I want an alpaca. Aside, goats’ eyes, or their pupils anyway, are rectangular.

This kept freaking me out because goats and their rectangular eyes would silently appear beside me and, in the absence of the feed cup, would start gnawing on my hoodie or my purse or my hair. Surreal.

Then came last weekend. Saturday was the Halloween parade in our neighborhood. The baby’s costume was inspired by the hopping vampires in this old, Chinese vampire movie called Mr. Vampire.

Obscure interests much?

When the husband and the baby were in New York this summer, they visited Chinatown and found various elements of the baby’s costume. We basically just had to take care of some makeup and the little prayer sheets.

It turned out pretty good, though nobody knew what he was and…well, I’ll come back to that in a sec.

The other big thing that happened this past weekend was that I turned 32 on Sunday. We celebrated at my mom’s house Saturday night.

I got some really nice stuff from Anthropologie (swoon!).

And there was cake and champagne and then my dad made the most absurd argument about how people can’t truly enjoy sports if they haven’t played them because they don’t appreciate how hard they are and for some reason this leads my dad to dismiss the entire Pittsburgh Penguins’ fan base (but no other sport) because he believes none of them/us have played hockey. Does your brain hurt after reading that? Yeah, imagine hearing it live. I pointed out that I’ve never practiced medicine but I appreciate it any time a doctor, like, gives me an emergency C-section to save the life of me and my child.

Sunday morning at 8:30 am (ugh) the baby had his last soccer game of the year. His team has had a rough season, winning only two games. It was a tough lesson for them, understanding that if you don’t try (which they often weren’t) you don’t get the results that you want. However, they were awesome during their last game, and even though they still lost, they looked pretty bad ass.

Their coaches gave them all trophies for their hard work. And though they were disappointed that they lost, I was secretly pretty glad that we were done for the year.

Sunday night was trick-or-treating. Now, we didn’t expect anyone to know what his costume was and I was really apprehensive about the assumptions that people would make. A lot of people responded simply, “Oh. Okay!” when he told them he was a Chinese, hopping vampire. But plenty of other people took a guess and said…sigh…”Chinaman.”

I know people get all irritated about political correctness, which is stupid because political correctness is just an admittedly poor term for a good thing: treating people with a equal amount of respect and not calling them things that they don’t wish to be called. There’s no legislation, there’s no censorship, it’s simply, “Hey, could you do me a solid and not be a douche and refer to my ethnicity/sexuality/religious/etc group as…?”

So, really, if you weren’t sure, “Chinaman” is not okay to say anymore. So stop.

Anyway, trick-or-treating went well. We had a perfect fall night and we’ve all been gorging on candy ever since.

And that was October. The end.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 3:29 pm and is filed under baby, chances are you don't care, husband, life n'at, pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.