My friends, family, and loved ones: I have so many things I need to do still tonight and for the remainder of the week. My eloquence is toast, my desire to create artistically pleasing phrases to describe our circumstances is worn to silence by hand-wringing over the to-do list.

So briefly: I am grateful for our second truly fabulous Halloween trick-or-treating experience. We went to houses we didn’t practice getting used to the displays for, he happily stayed out 10 minutes longer than last year (which is a huge success given that he spent 2 hours and 5 minutes at school earlier in the day with a different from his usual set of school activities and routine). For Tony, the school transition is a massive change by itself in his life and to tackle both in one day is a lot for his nervous system, but he handled it well. He independently said “trick or treat” and “thank you” to a higher percentage of people we interacted with. He even has a chewelry item he recently began to tolerate wearing and he uses that when we are at school or in other public locations, and he took it with us on Halloween also.

People have asked me what I went as and I told them as myself: a tired mom. We started out with an empty bucket, and returned home with one full enough I had to carry the box of popcorn we got at one of the houses we stopped at for him. This past Tuesday was a beautiful evening and that is all I have time to share for this week.