Lantern walk

Some preschools go apple picking, make construction paper turkeys, give out Halloween candy to celebrate fall. Ours does a lantern walk. According to the e-mail from the teacher, it's a way to recognize the diminishing light at this time of year and kindle our own inner light to carry us through. The kids scooped out pumpkins at school and the teachers tied ropes on them. We carved them at home and then brought them to a field at the teacher's farm last night just as it was getting dark (aka, dinner time).

Molly was very excited. I didn't even have to go down the stairs at Teddy's house to get her away from the neighborhood kids and ready to go. She came up on her own.

We got all bundled up in winter clothes and rubber boots. It was cold and muddy out there. The kids sat on hay bails while the kindergarten teacher told a story (I missed the details because I was walking around with Kate trying to keep her settled). Then we lit the lanterns and everybody walked in a long, curvy path through the field marked by lit candles on the ground.

It looked pretty cool but the kids didn't seem to get it. It was dark so they couldn't really play with (or even recognize) their friends. The teachers explained the point of it with a lot of metaphor and story, which seemed to fly right over the kids' heads. And it was at dinner time!! I'm sure it's fun for some kids to mix up the routine but in our house it's not pretty. Not right now, anyway. Kate fell asleep in the car in the 5-minute drive there, so I woke her up to put her in a carrier. She finally went back to sleep in the carrier as we were walking to the car, so I had to wake her up to put her in the car seat. Ack! And Molly was a mess on the drive home, upset about Kate's crying and saying she just wanted to go to sleep, then upset that we missed dinner (apparently stuffing her full of peanut butter and jelly at 4 p.m. was not a sufficient substitute).

Oh, well. Lesson learned. Strange candle-lit festivals out in fields in cold, muddy nights at dinner time? Bad idea.

In other news, Kate has learned her first baby sign ... "milk," of course. She doesn't always use it to request milk, more often to describe it. She likes to roll away from me while nursing and make the sign toward Molly. Rubbing it in, perhaps?