Nocturnal Creatures

Benjamin's well-known Halloween obsession seems to have resurfaced a little early this year. Over the past week or so, he has been asking every day--sometimes several times a day--"When will it be Halloween again?" I've answered with everything from "not for a LONG time" to "first we have to start spring, then have Easter, your birthday, summer holidays, a new baby, and the first two months of kindergarten--then it will be Halloween."

Still, Ben has started working on making new Halloween decorations out of his black Lego, including bats and other unidentifyable "scary things." Ben takes his work very seriously and will not allow any of these spookables to be dismantled (believe me, Janae and I know!).

As part of this intense interest in all things Halloween, Benjamin has been asking lots of questions about bats--What do they eat? Where do they live? Do they bite humans? Since my knowledge of bats is quite limited (surprising, I know!), I suggested a trip to our local library.

 

Here we took out every book and video we could find about bats. Even though most of the books were written for adults, Ben likes to sit and listen to all the information--then he'll say, "Let's play BATS," after which we pretend to be bats for as long as I can possibly stand it.

 

After a few days of this, Benjamin made a dramatic announcement last night at about 8:30 p.m.: "I decided I'm going to become nocturnal--I'm going to stay up all night, then sleep in the morning." Before I could wonder how this really differed from Ben's usual schedule, Ben had led Janae downstairs in a wild frenzy of dancing, singing, jumping, and screaming (Jason got it all on video if anyone is interested).

 

Of course, Ben's nocturnal activity lasted only about half an hour before he wanted to read stories and snuggle with his Mama. Still, my nocturnal creatures will probably look like this today.

 

I guess we only have about 7 more months of this to go. . . .