October is always a month that I very much look forward to. Fall is underfoot, Halloween is on its way, and so many of my loved ones will be celebrating their birthdays. October feels like a gateway month, helping to transition away from summer, into winter and onwards to another year.

Plans for October

My family and I have many plans for the month of October. The first thing we need to plan is birthday parties. Two very close family members will be celebrating one more year on this earth, I want to make sure that we can have wonderful and fun filled celebrations for them. We have had difficulties in celebrating birthdays over the last few years, as we have not stayed in any one country for very long. This has made birthday parties more difficult as we are trying to make new friends, adjust to life somewhere new, and figure out which new friends we actually want to celebrate with. I'm hoping that this year will be different, as we have finally decided to plant our roots in our current city. While we will definitely make sure to celebrate these birthdays with our family and relatives, we are still trying to figure out which friends we can bring together too. What we will probably end up doing is something like this: having one birthday celebration with family, and having a separate celebration with our new friends. This way, we not only get double the celebrations this month, but we will also be able to spend time with our family and friends in smaller groups, and hopefully be able to grow closer to everyone.

We will also start planning for Halloween! Halloween is probably my kids favorite holiday. They love dressing up in costumes, and of course also love all of the candy that they will be allowed to eat.

Halloween is not something we have always been able to celebrate in a normal way. We spent several years in Russia, which does not celebrate Halloween, and then a few years in China, where many people enjoy dressing up in Halloween costumes, but the local government, at least where we lived, restricted some of the ways we could celebrate the holiday, because they wanted to emphasize some of the traditional Chinese holidays around the same time. Even so, our kids were able to dress up and go trick or treating while we were in China.

But now that we are living in the United States, everyone around us is much more involved in Halloween, and decorations are already going up everywhere in our neighborhood. My wife, especially, has been busy decorating inside and outside of our house.

Pumpkins on our front porch. We will carve these into jack-o-lanterns as Halloween gets closer.

Spooky Halloween sticker on our front door. And one bunny from Easter last year!

A spooky ghost to greet everybody who makes it to our front porch.

I also have a lot of school work to do in the month of October. I am in my final year of law school, and am taking a full load of classes, making my free time very limited. I will have to complete a first draft of my advanced research and writing paper (which will need to be 30 pages total). I will also need to start thinking about which bar prep course I will enroll in, as well as sign up for the MPRE (the multistate professional responsibility exam), an exam that tests future attorneys on the rules of professional responsibility, so all attorneys know how to act ethically.

Finally, we will also be starting to make serious decisions on where my daughter will attend school next year. She has really enjoyed her current preschool, but will be starting full-time kindergarten in the fall of 2022. While my wife and I already have an idea of where we would like her to go, we still need to do our due diligence to make sure we are making the right decision.

With all of these things on my plate, I am incredibly excited to see how the month of October unfolds, even though I am also quite busy. I will try my best to be active both here on read.cash and on noise.cash, as I have already enjoyed the communities on both platforms so much, even though I have been a part of them for such a short amount of time.

Best wishes to everyone, and have a wonderful October. I would love to hear from others what plans they have for the month of October!