'Twas The Night Before...

It is almost Halloween again, and I have found myself behind again. This time around, I could blame it on working a few very long days. The truth is, I find myself in some version of this situation just about every year.
 
Why, I wonder, do I find myself repeating the same pattern each year? One of my biggest goals in life is learning from mistakes, so that the experience makes things better the next time. Why, then, do I let myself end up in this same place each Halloween?
 
I could buy our costumes. (And by ours, I really mean my kids', as I rarely muster the time and energy to don more than a wacky hat or googly-eyed pin--though I was quite famous at One Life to Live for a cow costume I wore a bunch of times.) Yet, each year, I decide that those costumes are too store-bought or too expensive, and so we go about doing our own, which is sometimes cheap (amazing what you can do with cardboard boxes and outgrown, yet not discarded, wardrobe items), and sometimes, well, not. Which means that a process that could have ended with a credit card swipe weeks ago lasts up until the big day.
 
Each year, I vow to do better the next year. (It seems that we do this on most holidays!), and each year, it is pretty much the same. But this year, something is a little different. While I am running around for supplies, my kids are largely creating the costumes. While I might be feeling guilty about what I'm NOT doing, they are learning, through necessity, how much they CAN do. Their costumes will come together because they have stepped up for the occasion, and when I see the pictures, I'll remember not what I didn't do, but what they did. Not how short we fell, but how well we adapted.
 
Tomorrow night, our home will be full of enough candy to last us till the spring. And along with that, there'll be memories of how with a little work and creativity all around, we made it past "'twas the night before," all the way to "trick or treat."