Discovering Halloween

I hope all my friends, family, and readers of my blog had a stupendous Halloween. Ours was pretty exciting, it being the first Halloween Collin has spent on the outside of my body. Being the over-excited mom that I am, I had to hand-make Collin’s costume, and four hours with a glue gun and a pile of felt later, he was a lion. I’m pretty excited about how it turned out, and how almost-too-adorable he was in it, though not so thrilled about how easy his mane was to tear apart with little baby hands and stick all over his flypaper skin (what is it about baby skin that makes it so sticky? Is it the layer of drool?) AND his eye (!!). He didn’t seem bothered at all by the costume in his eye, but I was incredibly bothered. I had big plans to extract it as soon as we got home, but by the time that happened, he was in full put-me-to-bed-RIGHT-NOW meltdown mode, and trying to mess with his eye at that point would have meant certain death for my ear drums, and possibly a call to the cops from a neighbor to report what would surely sound like a screech owl killing a family of squirrels.

Our good friends J & V and their Baby S joined us for the festivities, and I have to say, the best part of the night had to be the irony of the babies’ costumes. I didn’t even notice it until V pointed it out, and then I howled with laughter (I’m still howling). Her baby was a cow, mine a lion, a perfect Halloween costume version of their personalities, as well as the way they interact with each other. Like a cow, Baby S would be more than content to sit and eat all day long, stopping only to deposit a mountain of poop. She is gentle and sweet, and loves to sit back and observe her surroundings. My baby, the little lion, paves a path of destruction wherever he goes and anything within reach gets chewed on, especially including little innocent baby cows.

Probably the most amusing part of Halloween was all the childhood character stripper costumes. There was Stripper Snow White, Stripper Little Red Riding Hood, Stripper Alice in Wonderland… you get the idea. What is it about symbols of childhood that makes mostly young women (though there were a few wrinkly strippers out there) decide it’s a good idea to teeter around all night on sky-high heels and freeze to death in a next-to-nothing mini whatever? You know the first thing they are doing when they get home is putting on their sweats and crying over the blisters they got from pretending they were comfortable in stripper shoes all night. Whenever I see a stripper version of a Disney character, I only imagine that character down on her luck with nothing to do but work the pole for money. Maybe prince charming left her for a younger princess, and now she has found herself alone in the castle with a handful of hungry kids, and the jerk won’t even pay child support. By the way, I can poke at girls who dress like strippers for Halloween because, a lifetime ago, I too used to use Halloween as the one night a year to dress like a stripper. Oh, how times change.