storbarnsförälder

Today brought the supermarket delivery which included three pumpkins and the last of the Trick or Treat sweets. So Youngest, Middlest and I made up bundles of treats to give away. We have about 80, all vegan/halal/gluten free. Each contains milk chocolate, white chocolate, something chewy, something chalky (like Love Hearts or Parma Violets), and something sucky like a boiled sweet or lollipop. We also have a few backup sacks of skittles bags, for when they run out, though only the red bags are vegan - the special dark ones for Halloween aren't.

Tomorrow the kids will carve the pumpkins and then on Thursday we're ready for the ritual. I really look forward to it. Hugely.

The first floor of the house is clean and tidy - for the first time in months I am actually sitting at my desk using my computer; the ergonomic keyboard feels really weird. I do mean clean - I have even wiped down the skirting boards and the lightswitches.

There is a bowl of nuts and one of clementines in the hallway, and a secret sack of sweets for the kids who've really made an effort. There's a skull candle, and a spiral of nightlights, in the library window, facing the street.

My birthday cake just came out of the oven; it's a victoria sponge, and it smells very eggy, which is a bit peculiar. It look ok though, and by the time I've covered it in raspberry jam and whipped cream tomorrow, no-one will know it smelt eggy.

Now all we have to do is peel a couple of kilos of potatoes, another couple of kilos of root vegetables, prepare breadcrumbs for breadsauce and stuffing, parboil the spuds, and . . . I think that's it, apart from cleaning and tidying downstairs, which is so nearly clean anyway that it'll be fairly easy.

This is the first time I've successfully organised a birthday party for myself. I've done a few for my mother, whose birthday it also is, and at least one joint one for other friends whose birthdays are very close, and I've done a few for Rob. I did try to do one for my 21st but I was so sick we had to send everyone home. The interesting bit about this one has been picking people to have dinner with Rob's parents!

When I was 6, my mother and I visited one of her friends for Hallowe'en / our birthday. There was a big chocolate cake with 6 on it in green icing. I'd never had a birthday party before and it was incredibly exciting. And when I was 7, my older sisters did me a proper kids party with jelly and ice-cream and games and other children invited and everything. And when I was 13 my best friend and I went to Dun Laoghaire shopping centre and ate ourselves silly on cream buns and fizzy orange. And when I was 14 my two best friends and I cooked a roast chicken dinner for my mother, who was considerably older, and it has gone down in the annals of family history as a sniggery giggling noise. And when I was 16 my best friend's mother made me a cake and my best friend had to distract me and dawdle all the way home so that Iwas later than everyone else; when we walked into her house (as we did often enough, after school, that going to her house wasn't a signal) the whole family sang "La Breithe Faoi Shean" to me. And when I was 18, the doorman at Fibbers asked me for ID for the first time in 2 years. And the following morning a bunch of people who'd come back to my flat after the party asked me what I was doing in [my flatmate]'s flat. That was surreal.

For my 19th birthday, I loaned my boyfriend money to buy me a present, and took us to see Denis Leary. And for my 20th birthday, I went home from London with two healing but broken elbows - fractured 5 bones on 18 October that year. Oops.

Birthdays past and present. I have a feeling we went ice-skating for my 15th. Not sure.

Update: The first trick or treater was a lone boy in a shop-bought mask and cape, which didn't conceal his street clothes. He got nuts and a clementine.