Halloween is next week, and we’re still scrambling to figure out how we’re handling everything.

In an ideal world, with normal children, we’d simply be worrying about what the costumes would be for each of them – the baby’s liable to be a pumpkin or something else that my wife’s gotten from Target, and the Monster would be whatever he could verbalize that he’d want to be.  Since we don’t know precisely what he wants… well, he’s going to be a cowboy (I think), since he’s done that before and it’s not an unfamiliar outfit.

Of course, to me, there’s two major hurdles to get past – tomorrow and the actual Halloween day.

Halloween day is a minor issue, all things being equal.  We haven’t yet – as I discussed in an earlier post – done any dry runs or the the like, but the wife is starting to prepare the Monster for the ritual involved, in hopes that it will soak in.  The whole matter of ringing the doorbell, of not going inside, of what you’re supposed to say… yeah.  For this, Pathfinders for Autism has a few really great links (such as this PDF and this page on safety tips) and, and they’re easily found on the Internet – this is all just a matter of preparation for the day.

On the other hand, tomorrow is my company’s office party.  (It’s our local SVP’s – formerly my own company’s CEO before we were acquired – favorite holiday.)  Our office literally shuts down for 2+ hours for kids to come through trick-or-treating and for the various departments to show off their originality and design skills in a contest with fairly rich rewards.  We won last year, when we had a very big team effort… but.  I still have the picture on my desk from last year, when the Monster was clearly not feeling the whole creepy theme that we had going on.  I suppose that the fact that he’s not quite ‘at home’ with the whole dress up thing is a good part of why I get concerned about his coming in, or the fact that a lot of the departments do creepy themes.  We’ll see how that one goes.

And who knows – maybe he’ll realize that doing the ritual things he’s expected to do nets him one of his favorite things in the world, and it’ll stick…   Either way, it could well be a good social experience, I imagine, for him.