Are you ready to enjoy Halloween with your children? Here are a few Halloween announcements and notes from our family.

Halloween at our house

Z will be dressing up this year as a fairy riding a unicorn. It's a part-handmade, part DIY hack costume that makes use of the horse from her ladybug-cowgirl costume two years back and may end up incorporating elements from her hippo-princess costume last year.

We put up our Halloween decorations last night. These are all internal, as we live outside town and won't see any trick-or-treaters at our place. That means indoor lights (red/orange/yellow LED bulbs and a string of skeleton lights) and the decoration of a small purple fake Christmas tree with homemade Halloween ornaments (it also gets pulled out for Mardi Gras). As we decorated the tree, Z proudly noted each of the ornaments she had made, and asked which of us had made each of the others.

Win something Halloweeny

We've rounded up dozens of Halloween giveaways on PRIZEY. Most are still live, and users are adding last-minute ones to a rolling list. Take a look.

Great kids' media for Halloween

Jenna points us to a few great Halloween kids' books in an early Mini Media Mogul.

We're loving the DVD edition of A Very Brave Witch, which Scholastic sent to us at our request. The reason we asked for it, actually, was that it included the 1978 animated version of Tomi Ungerer's The Three Robbers, which you can see, for the moment at least, right here:



The premise of A Very Brave Witch, if you aren't familiar with it from the book by Alison McGhee and Harry Bliss, is that a witch has to be very brave to encounter non-witchy humans and their non-witchy ways. You can still get the book or the DVD on Amazon in time for Halloween. Or, you can put on a performance of your own.

Chronicle Books also has a sale in their own store - 30% off Halloween books with free shipping, through October 31. (That's an affiliate link there - we've joined their affiliate program to offer advertising on our sites, because we like so many of the kids' books they put out.)

Stay safe

The Consumer Products Safety Commission has some tips on keeping your kids safe on Halloween.

We love Halloween as the first of a fun-filled holiday season for kids and adults. We want to know how you're spending it. What will your child be dressing up as this year? Any Halloween traditions or events you're particularly looking forward to?

That's right - the classic Hasbro game many of us grew up with and thus think is actually a good first board game, Candy Land, will be coming to a theater near you. It would be a great project for Spike Jonze to sink his teeth into, if he weren't tied up in knots over Where the Wild Things Are. Instead, Universal Studios has Kevin Lima slated to direct, whose previous credits include Enchanted, the animated Tarzan, and 102 Dalmatians. Screenwriter Etan Cohen, an errant "h" away from greatness, wrote the scripts for Tropic Thunder and Madagascar 2. There's a bit more, but not much, in Variety. I'd say the game could make a fantastic movie, particularly because the story requirements imposed by the game are so underwhelming. Even the 1980s animated film Candy Land: The Great Lollipop Adventure seems to get positive parent reviews.

The above photo brings on a nice wave of nostalgia in me, how about you?

Little-known fact: Candy Land was created by a woman (Eleanor Abbott) who was recovering from polio, as a diversion for children who were struck with the disease. Milton Bradley came out with the game in 1949. In other words, if polio had terrorized the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century instead of the first, Candy Land probably wouldn't exist. But then again, I'd argue that even the worst television cartoons are more educational than Candy Land. It was one of the first "board games" for young kids, and in that sense it's a milestone, but we've seen far better games that help teach kids to take turns and "play a board game" in the decades since. Successful game developers now realize that games of skill can be scaled to any age, based on developmental challenges children face at different ages, rather than fading off into pure randomness. The world of Candy Land is a world in which we have no choices. Even toddlers can make choices.

But back to the candy. Here's another one of Bryan Kennedy's Candy Land shots:


There's also a Candy Land group on Flickr. It appears it was initially created to celebrate the game, but broadened in scope to be a celebration of candy itself. There are a few rough patches, but if you flip around a bit you'll see that there were not actually simply two versions of this game - the "classic" version and the indulgent, sticky-looking update you now see in stores - but went through several evolutionary steps, both in the board graphics and the player pieces.



I find this whole topic particularly interesting on a day spent thinking about an upcoming doctor's visit for Z, and received multiple recommendations to let the kid have lots of candy before, during, and after. Studies apparently show that the sugar or the love of candy can be not just a suitable reward for bravery, but can actually help suppress the pain response in young children. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details of all this, but it's good enough for me - I can seriously imagine Z having fewer issues with the needle if she's sucking on a piece of chocolate or a lollipop at the time, especially since she's training herself not to suck her thumb at the moment, with great success. (More on that on The Tranquil Parent next week.)

Need more of a candy fix? Check out the 1932 cartoon "Candy Town" on Punnybop, where eating lots of candy can have disastrous consequences!

I came into parenting pretty sick of Where the Wild Things Are - overexposed, I guess. It was so heavily pushed in doll, decor, and Reading-Is-Fun-poster form in my childhood that after passing through that golden stage I couldn't really read, look at, or hear it without seeing the gold-seal-embossed symbol it had become for the 1960s and the wild and woolly childhood it invoked.

But I had never read In the Night Kitchen, and when I checked it out from the library during Z's second year, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, I was amazed by what I found. It was poetry. I was allowed to read real poetry to my child, which she would listen to, and (at least partially) understand. I noticed that the rhythm of the language was what she was after then, plus the images, that the story came last of all. And I noticed that In the Night Kitchen was written in precisely that way, with an oddly fluctuating meter that poses more challenges to the adult reader than a toddler listener.

My four-year-old daughter Z and I have many favorite children's authors, and even more favorite children's illustrators, and when it comes to children's books, it's very difficult to state which is the more important feature of a good book. I didn't always see children's books that way, but reading to children is a process of both discovery and rediscovery - we find new life in favorites from our own childhood through our children's rapt, engaged attention to books new and old. And no author helped shape my growing awareness of the relationship between a child, a book, and its read-alouder than the works of Maurice Sendak.

Z and I memorized In the Night Kitchen. She could recite it as I read it. I could read it to her with the book facing her, turning the pages as I recited. It became one of my favorite books, as well as one of hers. And the love of particular books is one of the first things we have found that we can truly share on equal footing. I can't love Polly Pockets the way she does. I can't even love ice cream in quite the same way as she does, although I do love it. Certainly, the love we have for our other family members - her mother, my wife - is very different. But a book like that is something that we can both love in pretty much the same way. And that's a special kind of connection.

With that we turned to Where the Wild Things Are, and I discovered it as though reading it for the first time. Despite Max's celebrated orneriness, the book is far less a meditation on how independent, cranky, or downright wild children can be - there are much better books for that - as a fantasy about what it means to be trapped in your own bad feelings, with no one to understand them and no real desire to be understood so much as OBEYED. It is, in short, a fantasy about the control children see embodied in their parents, which, from their narrow perspective as the oppressed party, is as fickle, self-absorbed, and steely as the role Max plays in the place where the wild things are.

We memorized Where the Wild Things Are too, cover to cover, and I can jump in at any point ("and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes at once..." See? Scary). I fell in love with its language and the unique way it described childhood frustration and desire. "We'll eat you up, we love you so" - both parents and their children can relate to the sentiments of the Wild Things as much as to Max, in the love and tension they feel between their roles.

We're seeing this with Z especially these days; it's almost as though a hidden switch was flipped when she turned four, and she's now frequently yelling - literally yelling - at us about how FRUSTRATED WE ARE MAKING HER because we won't bend to whim X, Y, or, in most cases, simply Z. These exchanges usually end with her telling us she is NEVER COMING BACK to the room we are in; sometimes pouting ensues that requires some diplomacy, but generally she is back 30 seconds later, a new girl. Like Max, she has learned nothing in the encounter; she has just released the tension that had built up inside of her, and we, like Max's mother, may tut-tut or parry with consequences, but in the end, she's our kid, and we still have to feed her supper.

Soon, unless Warner Brothers kills it, we'll have a Spike Jonze film version of the book to ponder, although I'm suspicious it will be years before Z is ready for it. I used to worry about whether such adaptations would somehow commit cultural patricide, but either I don't get out enough anymore to worry about that or the book is just too good to need protecting. I do find it amusing that one of the reported problems with the film is that Max comes off as unlikeable. I don't really think Sendak wrote any likeability into Max, except what we infer from our general appreciation for children. Max's only redemption is that he actually misses his home, rather than being dragged back to reality against his will.

For today's entry in our Where the Wild Things Are giveaway and the chance to win a copy of the animated DVD featuring that story plus In the Night Kitchen and the Nutshell Library stories, tell us about your little wild thing. What have they done lately that made you think they should own a wolf suit?