Took My Tiny Child With Me To The Halloween Store. Walked In And Immediately Realized It Would Be A Terrible

Took my tiny child with me to the Halloween store. Walked in and immediately realized it would be a terrible mistake.

They had those jumpscare machine things everywhere, lots of spooky noise machines, scary looking animatronic things, crazy decorations, just the whole 9 yards and then some. I immediately went to turn around and leave when I heard a noise coming from my arms.

My one year old child who gets scared if we cough…. was laughing.

She makes this precious “eee!” sound and starts vibrating when she sees something she really likes, usually an animal or a balloon, and she points right at the big zombie thing by the door and does that. I carry her in past a huge 10 ft tall Pennywise inflatable, and she smacks me to tell me to stop so she can look. She ponders him for a moment, and his glowing light-up eyes, then points at his hand and shouts “BEEM!” Which is her word for “balloon.” She made us stand there under Pennywise for at least 3 minutes, which is a really long time for a one-year-old.

Then, she begs to get down, so I let her loose and she just books it all over the store. Finds the creepy demonic looking babies and shouts “BABY!” then gets this confused look on her face and tries to wipe the “dirt” off their faces. Decides it’s not worth it, goes and picks up a severed hand decoration, hands it to me and says “hand.” Yes, my dear, it is a hand. And yes, that severed foot has “toes,” you’re very right.

Finds the wigs, runs down the aisle shouting “hair! hair!” and grabbing her own sparse little headfuzz so hard I think she’s going to rip it all out. Then she found the speaker in the wall that was blaring Monster Mash and she demanded I pick her up so we could “DANSSSE”. But she got distracted by the big spider decorations, which she christened as dogs by running toward them and barking.

She ran up and down the aisles of costumes touching the fabric and making her little “tss tss tss” giggle that she does when she’s having Much Too Good a Time. Every so often she’d stop, look back to make sure I was there, and point at something and vibrate with her aggressive “EEEE!”

A man turned a corner wearing one of the creepy latex masks. He immediately started apologizing to me, saying “I’m so sorry, I’m looking for my friend, I don’t want to scare her.” Meanwhile my child is standing there looking up at him with the most confused look on her face. Not scared, just confused, like he is so dumb and she can’t figure out why he would want to make that stupid face for so long. But he rounds another corner all hunched over, she flaps her arms and sighs, and takes off to go scream at the creepy lawn decorations.

When it was time to go, nothing could convince her to come to me willingly, so I had to promise her one last look at the balloon man while I picked her up against her will. Pennywise placated her, and we left the store with a smile on her chubby little cheeks. She demanded we wait and watch the big inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man out front, the one that was bright orange and had a jack-o-lantern face, and she bounced and wiggled and danced in my arms despite its fan being louder than the loud motorcycles that scare her on our walks. She waved bye-bye to it as we left for the car.

Basically, that was the cutest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, and it’s so crazy how so many things are culturally taught and kids are just… immune to that. All she saw was bright colors and things she recognized and could name, in a place she could explore and touch. She has no concept of clowns being scary or zombies being A Thing or what constitutes “creepy” and “spooky” and “gross.” To her, a severed arm with gore hanging out the end doesn’t represent pain or violence, it’s just “arm,” and it’s got some weird stuff on the end that’s funny colors. They’re just things, there’s no context for it.

The world is weird and beautiful and it’s so cool to see it through the eyes of someone who is so New to this planet and hasn’t been influenced by society and culture yet.

Tags

reblogs this is absolutely adorable misc.

More Posts from Caustic-caffeine and Others

caustic-caffeine

1 year ago

and so it begins. random tumblr posts pinterest put in my feed but as my ocs.

(if any of you have recs please tag me under the posts teehee)

Tags

art oc art doodle tumblr memes i am going insane

6 notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

7 months ago

Want to help an unemployed college student that's not allowed to have a job and get a super swaglistic drawing for real fricking cheap and eternal gratitude in return?? Then I'm your guy!!

DM me on Discord!!!! I'm Forkbirtuna there as well!

Ko-fi

Support Forkbirtuna on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/forkbirtuna

Support Forkbirtuna On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

PLS PLS I'LL DO ANYTHING AAAA (I'm new to using PayPal and Ko-fi so pls be patient, I will ask questions 😭)

Tags

reblogs others art others’ projects

30 notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

9 months ago

Tags

just thoughts reblogs misc.

226K notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

1 year ago

teehee

1 note View Post

caustic-caffeine

7 months ago

Please support me

, I'm Karam Al Nabih from Gaza. My home, dreams, and university have been destroyed by the war. I'm a software engineer in my final semester, and I'm urgently seeking your support to rebuild my life and help my sick mother.

Please consider donating, even a small amount like 10 or 15 £, as every contribution makes a difference. If you can't donate, please share my story to help me reach my goal. Your support means the world to me.

Reblog pin post

Donate here: https://gofund.me/a9d0f2d7

Thank you so much! 🙏❤️

Vatted by @nabulsi @90-ghost

I hope you reach your goals!

Tags

palestinian genocide free palestine all eyes on palestine just thoughts support palestine campaigns and fundraisers

0 notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

1 year ago

no these dynamics are so fun kajajjdjdw

making a collection

Tags

writing just thoughts reblogs misc.

74K notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

9 months ago

you have a boyfriend????

not entirely sure how to interpret this question so i’ll interpret it as you just not knowing i did :p

yes, i do, he’s @boxxed-upkr (unboxxed_kr on instagram)!

Tags

answered asks asks open just thoughts

3 notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

1 year ago

Tags

doodle just thoughts so here for both experiences though i love all my moots

4 notes View Post

caustic-caffeine

7 months ago

My son has set the house up with a Pi-Hole. It’s a raspberry pi running Ad blocking on the whole house’s network.

We’re a few hours in and we’re seeing effects, as well as some teething problems.

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

For you can do it too!https://t.co/l1SLzPrzp6

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 11, 2022

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

They show your your stats on a neat little dashboard. pic.twitter.com/RQB39IvnKD

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

There’s a handy explanatory video from Dr. Johnny Ryan which sets out how we could end up with Just So Much ads.

Each webpage load can potentially run an auction (with you as the prize pig on the block) sending data to loads of different brokers. https://t.co/wUosBLjM3f

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022

Privacy International has a short and clear guide to what hardware you can use for setting up a Pi-Hole as well as some setup instructions.

Ad-blocking (home surveillance thwarting) is a human rights issue too!https://t.co/1vphCsaug1

— Simon McGarr (@Tupp_Ed) August 12, 2022

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.