In Which Connor The Yeti Has An Eventful Day

 Cutest.  Yeti.  Ever.

Connor the Yeti wore his costume pretty much all day today, and he had a great time!  He loved stroking all of the fake fur and carefully feeling his socks.  It's obvious how much he loves it because he even asked to have the hat on!  He didn't try to take it off the whole day.

At around 11:00 we went down to one of our favorite little coffee shops, where Jer and I got brunch and watched Connor the Yeti charm the pants off of everybody.  Then we drove downtown and walked around Pioneer Park for a little bit.  We had the playground to ourselves, so Connor the Yeti got to swing on the swings for a long time! 

After a proper resting up, we headed down to the mall for a little trick-or-treating.  Our local mall puts on a miniature Halloween festival, and a bunch of the stores give out candy.  What better way to introduce Connor the Yeti to the concept of trick-or-treating?  It would be in indoors, in an environment he knows well, and not in the dark.  If he did really well we figured that Jer would take him out this evening in our neighborhood.  Because it was such a sunny day, we figured there wouldn't be very many people there.

Boy were we wrong about that.

The first thing we noticed that was unusual was the fact that all of the parking lots seemed to be full; we had to drive around the mall to find a handicap spot, which is pretty unusual.  Then we got inside and beheld the glorious chaos within.  There were lines for the candy.  We're talking outside-the-store-and-around-the-corner kind of lines.  Like us, many of the stores had also vastly underestimated the number of children who would be there and had run out of candy in the fifteen minutes the festival had been running before we got there.  So they kept having to run over to the Target and buy more.  You could tell when they opened a fresh bag of candy because there would be a stampede in the general direction of that store.  There were children everywhere.  If we'd had the slightest notion of what this was going to look like, we never, ever would have taken Connor the Yeti there.

But you know what?  He did a fantastic job!  Other than throwing his bucket on the floor a couple of times he didn't protest at all, and he seemed pretty interested in the other kids and all of the costumes.  He didn't even take his hearing aids out, and let me tell you it was LOUD in there.  We only stayed about fifteen minutes because that was all of the noise and excitement Jeremy and I could stand, but Connor the Yeti was still going strong when we left.  Maybe his yeti costume makes him feel like he has armor on or something; there wasn't a whole lot of exposed skin for people to touch.  He did maintain a death-grip on my finger when I was walking next to the wheelchair, but that was the only sign that he was the least bit nervous.

His costume was a tremendous hit, though people had a hard time figuring out what he was.  Most of them seemed to think he was a rabbit with teeth, which made me really tempted to start spouting comments about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.  Once we told them that he was a yeti they only seemed to get even more excited about his costume, which Connor the Yeti seemed to appreciate.  We didn't see a single other yeti out at the mall, and since I'm relatively sure every kid from the entire county was there it's a pretty good bet that he was the only one of the evening.  I think he was pretty happy about all of the praise he got.  We may be seeing Connor the Yeti popping up after Halloween too, if he's that comfortable in the costume. 

We told him when we got home that if he wanted to he could go out trick-or-treating this evening he could.  He spent the next two hours in a state of extreme excitement; he was giggling and squealing and just being ridiculously adorable and happy.  At around 6:00 in the evening, just as it was getting dark, Jeremy and Connor the Yeti embarked on their great Neighborhood Trick-or-Treating Adventure!

It lasted all of ten minutes.

I was sitting and waiting by the bowl on candy when there was an enthusiastic knock on the door and when I opened it, Jeremy wheeled Connor the Seizure Yeti back into the house.  Apparently they'd made it down one side of our street and were coming back down the other side.  Jeremy had just rung the doorbell on a house almost directly across from ours when Connor the Yeti (who apparently share's non-Halloween Connor's impeccable sense of dramatic timing) started having a massive seizure as the door opened.  Since the little guy was still breathing Jeremy just left our (probably now thoroughly freaked-out) neighbor's doorstep and jogged across the street and up our front walkway. 

The little guy was still conscious and lucid, but he was jerking pretty violently and was having a difficult time catching his breath.  We started him on oxygen and decided to go ahead and give him the Diastat after about four minutes because he was getting more and more upset and scared as he seized.  He was trying to cry but couldn't get any sound out because he was jerking so hard that he couldn't catch his breath, and so silent little tears were rolling down his face.  It was heartbreaking, to say the least.  The seizure stopped about a minute after we gave him the emergency medication, and so then Connor The Saddest Yeti That Ever There Was sobbed himself to sleep in my arms. 

So that was not exactly the Halloween experience we were hoping for. 

There was one bright spot to the end of the evening though; since all the trick-or-treaters went to the mall this year instead of our house I have a huge supply of leftover chocolate.  Since Jeremy's trying to keep his body fat percentage down so that he has less weight for his feet to move, he's not going to want to eat too much of it.  Looks like I'll be forced to consume massive amounts in the next few weeks so it doesn't go stale. 

Horrors!

~Jess