Thursday, September 23, 2010

Handling Halloween

I am in what I consider my first big boy parenting dilemma. You see, I'm not one of those moms who feels like sheltering my child from everything bad in life is the best thing for him (or for me). It stretches me knowing that I am going to have to explain things, let Brayden experience things that he has to make decisions for, and finally know that there is evil in the world. It's part of life. Sheltering him now will only prolong the inevitable in my opinion.

That opinion is one of the reasons I (along with Drew) have decided that we won't NOT let him trick or treat or "celebrate" halloween (in fact, he's already had his first taste of Halloween last year and was a CUTIE!). I say celebrate loosely; I don't mean it will be a HUGE ordeal at our house. Sure, fall will, along with harvest and Thanksgiving. But Halloween will be one of those things that we will participate in with trick or treating and any other little parties that blow our way, and then we'll be done with it. I guess my dilemma is how to EXPLAIN halloween. Ofcourse the hardest part of that is now, when I have a little boy obviously interested in everything that he sees and hears, and wants to know what things are, but can't even say his abc's. The logic of a huge witch statue or a talking skeleton don't make much sense. But he shows such interest in in and they are EVERYWHERE right now, that I tend to stumble on the words that come out of my mouth. Just today for example, We walked into Walmart, and there next to the buggies is a skeleton butler. Brayden immediately points and says "dis dis dis" wanting to see/touch it. Skeletons symbolize the evil side of Halloween, so I don't really want him thinking that those are OK or normal. So I said that that was yucky and mean. He kind of looked at me perplexed, and we moved on through our shopping experience. But as I laid in bed at nap time the entire exchange bothered me. I don't want him to think skeletons are evil. What that skeleton represents is evil. But how do you do that with a 17 month old? I am sure this is something Drew and I will have an ongoing conversation about... things like this ebb and flow with parenting, as there's no clear way to really handle it. What have you done with your kids, especially when they were really little?
 

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