As a Christian, I am somewhat ambivalent about the holiday of Halloween. I understand and want to distance myself from its more obscure and sinister Pagan beginnings, but neither do I think that things aren’t able to be re-interpreted and re-appropriated to take away the negative meaning and replace it with something positive. I don’t think a lot of what goes on nowadays during Halloween has much to do with its more insidious roots.

Shorty, for his part, LOVES dressing up in costumes for any reason. He enjoys keeping the costumes for later use, as well; sometimes he’ll keep them for several years in a row, so when his friends (who are all shorter than he is) come over, sometimes we get a whole little midget Justice League going on during playtime. My mother always takes Shorty trick-or-treating, which probably adds to his love of Halloween - what kid doesn’t love getting tons of candy and dressing up as his favorite superhero? He plots about it for weeks in advance.

I’ve tried to compromise. We don’t go to anything that celebrates death or the macabre in any way; we don’t go to haunted houses or Halloween festivals, and we don’t put up any decorations of occult things, like vampires and witches. But we do interpret it as a harvest festival. We visit pumpkin patches, put up gourds and fall-colored leaves for decorations (we are in Miami, where the leaves are always green, so this is a novelty for us!!), we participate in our park group’s Halloween party, and we go trick or treating around the neighborhood. My mother’s neighborhood; mine isn’t nice enough to go trick or treating in. We focus on it as a celebration of the fall season, wherein people get one day a year to dress up in silly clothes and no one will judge them for the whole night!

Some of the families at the park group do allow their kids to dress up as vampires or witches, but no one ever gets too gory, and Shorty understands that not everyone believes as we do and that people’s right to different beliefs are to be respected. One or two families don’t participate at all for religious reasons; it’s never really been a problem. This year, I found a GREAT Halloween lapbook to do which explores the historical roots of the holiday in a very unbiased, factual way while integrating kid-friendly activities such as decorating pumpkin faces. so we’ll be doing that the last week of October in order to inform ourselves thoroughly about the subject.

The one mundane thing I do hate about Halloween is the hassle of costume shopping. The actual act of picking out a costume is great fun, except that all the Halloween stores in our area are always staffed by apathetic teenagers and frequented by… people from Miami. LOL So it’s just a tremendous chore to have to spend hours sorting through the heaps of disorganized messes to find the Red Power Ranger or Superman costume in my kid’s size, make sure everything is in the bag where it’s supposed to, make sure the costume is the size the bag says it is, etc etc etc. Inevitably, the one my kid has his heart set on isn’t there, and then it becomes a matter of finding a costume he can live with and comes in his size, and so on. It’s such a pain!

A friend of mine recommended I buy his costume this year online, and so I think I’m going to buy it at one of those online Halloween costume stores. I’m pretty happy with that one in particularly, actually. Their prices are very impressive - those costumes are way more in the temporary specialty stores at the mall, and though they’re not as cheap as Walmart’s prices, they’re also apparently much nicer costumes, as well. I was browsing through the boys’ section and ohmygoodness, look how cute this astronaut one is! Aside from that, their shipping policy is pretty good. If I order by mid-October, they guarantee it’ll be here on time, and they’ve apparently been around since the 80s, so I feel like chances are good they’ll pull through.

I’m actually not 100% sure what Shorty wants to be this year - probably another superhero - but it doesn’t really matter because their selection of children’s costumes is almost overwhelming. And they have a pretty nice selection of costumes for grown-ups, too, so maybe I’ll cave and get one for myself, too! I’m thinking a fairy princess. What? Some of us never outgrew our love of dressing up. How else do you explain away my lifelong love of Renaissance fairs?

There is no question Shorty’s judo class has improved his coordination and large motor skills immensely. He can now do back rolls, somersaults, lunges, forward rolls and many other things he couldn’t do a few months ago.

Yes, that is him doing a forward roll over the mat there. Note the flags of the US, Japan AND Cuba in the background. I should probably post this in my much-neglected Found in Miami blog.

Anyway, he’s learned a lot, but all large motor skills that require broad, imprecise movements. Large motor skills such as push-ups, lunges and sit-ups, which require more precise motor control, still elude him despite seven months of tri-weekly practice. I’ve noticed during warm-ups, he hardly does any of the warm-up exercises correctly; in some cases, despite repeated instruction, he doesn’t quite seem to grasp what the exercise actually entail. The actual fitness benefits of what he does manage to do seem dubious, and I think his progress in mastering more subtle judo moves has been seriously hindered by indirect

association.

The judo studio to which Shorty belongs devotes a great deal of one-on-one attention to each child, more than most places, and there are less than twenty children in Shorty’s class. There is a main judo master, and he sometimes but doesn’t always have assistants. The assistants, remarkably, are adult judo students of the judo master (I will call him Professor M. for anonymity’s sake) . Many of them were students of his as children, and continue to study judo as adults, as well as sending their own children to the studio! If that’s not a testimony of how good Professor M. is, I don’t know what is.

However, he is quite elderly, and just doesn’t have the ability to monitor that every child is mastering every move perfectly, and I think in regard to the warm-up exercises, Shorty has kind of fallen through the cracks.

Shorty has the desire to start a much more formal second martial art such as Tae Kwon Do on the alternating days he doesn’t have judo (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday). I am amenable to this, but I don’t think he’s really developmentally ready to tackle this. So I’ve decided to agree to pay for a second martial art – IF he agrees that on the alternating days he doesn’t have judo, he will practice one-on-one with me at home the warm-up exercises and do some large-motor exercises with my pilates ball out in the yard, as well as building stamina with a brisk walk with me around the block a few times, from here until his 11^th birthday in February. He’s very excited and not at all offended like I thought he would be - he wants to progress in judo faster than he is! He really wants that yellow belt, I guess.

My grandma and I have both been looking for ways to get some exercise into our schedule – she for circulatory health and I for health and weight loss. It’d be nice if we could figure out some way for the three generations of my family to enjoy exercising together!

Like many people who have been through a divorce, I experienced financial hardship at the time of my separation. I was a very young and unemployed college student with a special needs baby, and without a lot of financial know-how, and as a result, I made a lot of credit mistakes that haunted my credit score for years. This has weighed pretty heavily on me for quite some time, so I spent a year self-educating about personal finances, and for the last six months, I have been in the process of repairing my credit and steadily becoming debt-free.

(Side note: I can’t stress the importance of making sure your credit report is accurate. Prior to this summer, I hadn’t bothered to look at mine in years. When I finally got my free annual credit report, imagine my surprise to find no less than seventeen reporting errors! It goes without saying, I’ve been contacting the credit reporting agencies and having them deleted slowly but surely - the subject for another post, for sure..)

Besides cleaning up my credit report of negative information, I’ve also started wanting to build up my positive credit. I already have one unsecured credit card that I’ve almost completely paid off, but I wanted a second one, too, because there are all those erroneous negatives to stack up against. I don’t want to acquire more debt, so I don’t actually use them for anything - I just pay off the “set-up” fees, and want to have several credit cards in good standing. Unfortunately, unsecured credit cards for people with fair or poor credit tend to carry some set-up fees, but I don’t think they’re terribly exorbitant, especially when you can pay them off in small increments. Of course, I pay as much as I can to get those balances down as quickly as possible, but the minimum balances are doable, too.

Anyway, I had been mailed the offer of my first card, and had no clue where to begin actively looking for a second.

Enter CardHub, a site that allows you to apply for multiple credit cards in one place. I think this is a great site and a great service. Basically, it has a huge list of credit cards for which you can apply based on several criteria that you select. It is a completely free service. You choose your credit history, your desire to view either unsecured or secured cards (or both!) and whether you want a Visa or a Mastercard, or both.

With one click, CardHub shows you all the available credit cards that fit your criteria for which you can apply. Each search result shows you all the information you might want to know, such as set-up fees, annual me Not only that, you can compare all the different cards for which you want to apply side-by-side, so you can make the most informed choices. The site is basically a highly intuitive niche search engine and does not store any personal information about you while performing this service, with which, being concerned with online privacy, I was very pleased.

Much to my pleasant surprise, using CardHub, I had been approved for a new credit card that fit my exact criteria within 5 minutes. A little testimonial blurb on the site had someone declaring it “the Google of credit cards,” and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. This is a great tool for empowering consumers to make informed choices about their credit applications. My needs were fairly simple, but I can imagine that for someone with even more complex needs, such as debt consolidation by moving to a card with lower APR, it would be an even more powerful resource. Even as a research tool, it’s very useful and quick. Very nice!

International Literacy Day is sponsored annually by the International Reading Association and is designed to focus attention on literacy issues. The day is marked by many events throughout the world, including the presentation of a U.S. $20,000 UNESCO International Reading Association Literacy Prize.

The International Reading Association estimates that 780 million adults, nearly two-thirds of whom are women, do not know how to read and write. They also estimate that 94–115 million children worldwide do not have access to education. International Literacy Day is just one way the Association strives to increase literacy around the world.

Click here to find out how to help increase literacy around the world. Spend the day reading with - or to - someone you love. If you are a teacher (of your own or someone else’s children) click here to download and print idea-starters for activities and events for children to celebrate International Literacy Day in the classroom or home.

Shorty and I plan to do a household book drive and donate at least 5 books apiece to our local public library system in honor of the day. The Miami-Dade Public Library System has a great and very active adult literacy program called L.E.A.D. that has helped hundreds of adults increase their literacy skills. Every time we visit a library in the afternoon or on the weekends, we notice the L.E.A.D. folks working with adults in the community in the nearby tables. Very cool.