"I want Trick or Treat"
"What are you doing?"
"I want juice"
"I want choc(late chip) cookie"

 

Halloween night was challenging. Perhaps other parents know this, but I did not: no matter how difficult it is to get your child in the costume, make sure you put it on BEFORE Halloween night. Never assume that holding up the costume is good enough to tell fit. We tried to put Owen in his incredibly adorable dragon costume on Halloween night, and it didn't fit. My child, who takes a 3T, couldn't even get this 4T costume over his shoulders! Okay, I ordered online so returning it would have been hairy. And I can see why I picked 4T, the next size up said "fits 45 - 60 lb." (Owen is ~33 lbs). But really, how could it not fit even over his shoulders?

Owen has a long torso, from both sides of his family. He also has stubby limbs, relatively speaking, so while his height is in the 75-90% range, his torso is even longer than that. It's easy to get complacent, since I think of him as a 3T, and that's what I did. It never occurred to me we'd be doomed in a 4T. Never. One-piece costumes are not for us, apparently, and I won't make this mistake twice. I'm fortunate, if there was a year to have this happen, it was this one when he's blithely indifferent to the costume idea. He was interested only in the chocolate, even the firefighter hat was of no interest.

But it certainly squashed my little fantasies of happy pictures. In exchange for sucking up my horror ("no delightful pictures, and it's all my own fault!") I settled on no record of the evening at all. That suited Owen, who is always happy to skip the photos.

Owen showed his true colors immediately, catching on to the whole chocolate thing and practically twitching with excitement. We'd pour out M&M's to an audible gasp, and periodically I'd catch him making little Homer Simpson noises. Cute. And scary.

Owen has been singing and talking up a storm these days. Often in the back seat, we'll hear him singing along to the Wiggles songs. There's one that has animal noises, and in the back seat, we'll hear an elephant or a tiger or monkey. He sings with his nose planted in his Clifford activity book, or Piglet book, it's very cute. I can't get over the fact that he looks so much like he's reading, and that he'll for all intents and purposes tune us out as though he were reading a morning newspaper. I guess we all unwind in our own way.

The costume that never was