We worked really hard to make a costume for Sawa. She has a favourite movie about a young witch named Kiki that leaves home at 13 according to tradition, but she doesn't know any spells so she starts a flying delivery service on her broom. We got just the right black dress, hair ribbon, broom, and her grandmother sewed an amazing stuffed version of her tiny black cat named Jiji. But Sawa decided to be an elephant.
She went trick-or-treating at daycare this morning with a lot of princesses and lions. She came home with a prized hoard, and when I hid half of it, she knew immediately, and has been cross-examining us ever since. Like last year, it was raining, and we didn't go house-to-house in the evening.
We also carved pumpkins on the weekend in the form of characters from My Neighbour Totoro, another late 1980s Studio Ghibli animation that Sawa can recite. They are melting into goo on the dining table and hatching fruit flies.
If you look very closely, you might notice that Sawa has a fat lower lip. That's the only indication that she fell Tuesday night as she was getting into bed, and put her teeth through her lower lip. She got the wound glued closed at Sick Kids at one in the morning. We thought briefly that she might make a good zombie, with facial wounds and blood-soaked pyjamas, but she healed too well and the blood came out of everything in the wash.
