throwaway pancake: costume

So, here we go again. Halloween. Blech.

See, I'm trying.

About a month ago, I started asking Tagg what he wants to be for Halloween. "I want to be Tagg." "I'm just a boy." "NO COSTUME!!!" This goes on for weeks and then one day, the answer is "I want to be a funny bat." Woo-hoo! An actual costume! But wait. What the hell is a funny bat? I look it up online and there's nothing. Apparently he is the first kid in history to request a funny bat costume.

I can't convince Tagg that any of the Batman costumes are "funny bats" so I'm screwed. Maybe he'll go back to just wanting to be Tagg. He did seem mildly interested in a skeleton costume that showed up on the search so I'm thinking that might, just might be a back-up plan.

And then one day, he walks in and says, "Mom, I want to be a scuba diver." What?! Great, but what?! Where did THAT come from? So I Google it. In case your kid ever asks for a scuba diver costume, there is no such thing. You can either buy real scuba gear for a bazillion dollars or you can try to fashion one from household-type items in a real artsy-craftsy, do-it-yourself moment. That's the route we took.

Looks so cute right? And easy.
Not so much.

I sent my dad on a Home Depot, craft-store treasure hunt for the gear while I scoured the city's sporting good stores and retail outlets for a cheap-ish diving mask and flippers. (Impossible to find, apparently, once fall sets in). Then we had my mom distract the kids with frosting and decorating Halloween cookies while me and dad spent two hours making air cartridges and the holster out of netting, spray paint, velcro and duct tape (silver spray paint does NOT stick to 2-liter bottles, by the way) and finally, it was kind of okay. Not great but functional.

So I put our masterpiece on the counter. The next morning Sloane had 30 seconds of unsupervised time and bam! completely trashed the fruits of our labor. She had a piece of velcro in her mouth and duct tape on her head when I found her. Not good.

"Scuba gear de-constructed." - By Sloane

So, back to the great costume search. I ended up ordering the stupid skeleton costume. 20 bucks plus 20 bucks in rush shipping. Really? Really.

Kinda cool, right? IF you can get your kid to wear
the mask and the gloves AND the foot things. Which I cannot.

New costume idea? Skeleton Scuba Steve. A mish-mash of the skeleton costume (he'll only wear the body suit, no mask or gloves) and the scuba outfit (no canisters or air tank, and no scuba mask but tie-dye swim-lesson goggles are okay, flippers but only if they're taped to his feet so they don't trip him). And oddly enough, it kind of works.

That's an outfit, right?

So after bribing Tagg to get in his new costume with the help of epic-amounts-of-candy-potential bribery, and wrangling Sloane into her sparkly Tinkerbell outfit, off we went to trick-or-treating round 1 at my office. Sloane was not happy. Tagg was not happy. But one candy bar later, they were both down with the magic of Halloween. Sugar.

A Halloween Miracle. In spite of a chocolate bar and a red sucker,
Sloane's darling outfit survived for round 2 of trick or treating.

Cousins It.

"You got any contraband candy under there?"

Trick or treating this year consisted of 20 minutes of pictures, 6 houses of trick-or-treating (after Tagg stripped off the scuba half of his outfit and insisted on riding his scooter from house to house), hauling home half their body weight in candy, beer treats for the adults at our lovely neighbor's house, and then answering the door for about two-dozen trick-or-treaters while we played jumping games with glow-sticks in a completely dark living room.