Choo-choo train! (or, in the common parlance, "trick or treat")

Here's how you don't want to start out your Halloween: you wake up to the sounds of your daughter, in her room, saying (with a good deal of alarm in her voice) "uh-oh . . . oh no . . . uh-oh . . . it's yuuuuuucky . . ."

You know the rest. It's all over the room. Rancid. Still warm.

Mae had . . . a rough Halloween, spending most of the morning pale as a ghost (get it?) and shivering, while continually, and adorably, apologizing for the mess her stomach made in her room.

So, of course, we cancel our evening plans, reassure and comfort her, and settle in for a day at home, with j-ello and pedialyte substituting for the usual candied apples and cheap chocolate confections.

Then, of course, she spends the afternoon bouncing off the walls and asking when it's time to put on her "Cinderella dress" (which is what she calls her costume, pictured below.)

In the end, we wound up taking her out for just a few minutes so she could experience trick-or-treating as a 2-year-old, a ritual she didn't really understand but which she got the knack of just as we decided it was time to take our pale little ghost home.

Her "Cinderella dress"

Yeah - we don't get it either. Whatever gets her excited to wear it though, am I right?

She was going to be Princess Leia again, but for some reason expressed primal horror every time the costume was presented to her for inspection. So, I picked this up on sale at the OSU bookstore.

The same kid who puked up an entire town's population worth of food just a few hours earlier:

Hopping like a frog:

She didn't really "get" the whole trick-or-treat thing, and didn't really say that unique password (the only time she tried it came out as "choo-choo train!") or even "thank you." She did ask a few people how they were doing, but mostly she liked ringing the doorbells ("I push a button!") and, of course, taking candy, even though she looked baffled as to why people would just give such a valued treasure away.

This guy offered to give her some of his decorations that she was admiring.

She's a charmer, that's for sure.

In all, the evening turned out all right, even though all three of us were feeling south of lousy.

Of course, we probably exposed a good number of citizens to whatever bug caused her to paint her nursery green, but if Halloween isn't about spreading horror around, then what the heck is it for?