I may have mentioned before how Halloween is a High Holiday in my house. I come from a long line of women who for whatever reason love Halloween more than any other holiday. Christmas is fine, we enjoy the giving and the togetherness, but nothing gets us excited like a bunch of bats and some candy apples. It's entirely possible that the reason I became a professional actress was my love for playing dress-up. My sister Margot really takes this to extremes: you know how people volunteer at holiday-time? Every Halloween, she volunteers... AT A HAUNTED HOUSE. Where other people do Christmas in July, she does Halloween in April. When she was getting her degree in sociology, her thesis was on the phenomenon of slutty Halloween costumes for young women, how the whole point of the holiday was to be a "Naughty nurse" or an S&M version of Rainbow Brite (therapy, anyone?). She doesn't conform to such stereotypes herself, of course: her costumes generally forgo sexiness and flattering cuts in favor of cleverness. She also usually makes her boyfriend coordinate with her. This year, she wasn't allowed to volunteer at the haunted house as usual because her doctor said that, post-surgery, her immune system wasn't strong enough to allow her to safely interact with that many members of the public who may or may not have H1N1 or god knows what else.
So, as she couldn't go to the haunted house, she decide she'd just BE a haunted house. She got a big ol' box and cut a ton of tiny windows and painted it black and lit it from within to make the windows glow and walked around inside it, with--and this is the best part--ghost sock puppets on her hands, coming out of the haunted windows. This, my friends, is what I call commitment.The large box also provided her with the necessary germ-free bubble that allowed her to venture out to a party. Is clevah, no?
So it goes without saying that the sister of someone so dedicated cannot just half-ass this holiday. You can't be a cafeteria catholic if your sister is a nun. Well, I guess you can, but you'd have a disconnect, and you'd have a hard time figuring out what to get your brother-in-law for Christmas (I mean, God? The ultimate Guy Who Has Everything). So even if I wanted to, I cannot phone it in. And I wouldn't want to even if I could. I, too, love Halloween. LOVE. I love the candy buying and answering the doorbell and commenting on the kiddies' costumes, I love picking out a pumpkin and carving it up and almost gagging at the seeds being so gross, and I love mulling for months over what we're going to dress as, and wandering around Lincoln Park (because the big brownstones have the coolest decorations and the best candy, and because trick or treating in a high rise is totally lame), even if it means bundling up and/or just suffering with wind-chapped cheeks and purple fingers clutching that treat bag, because by God, Halloween ROCKS.
One of the BEST things about having a child--and I acknowledged this as a benefit early on, about five minutes after I found out I was pregnant--is that I totally have an excuse to dress up now. Not that I didn't still dress up before, but I was never able, pre-child, to get Aquaman to dress up WITH me, to do any semblance of a "theme" together. Now I can. Bwa hahahaha.
Likewise, one of the best things about Frog going to a Jewish preschool (besides delicious hamentaschen and challah) was that they did Purim, so we got NOT ONE BUT TWO HALLOWEENS!!!
Aquaman tries to get me to wait until it is ACTUALLY OCTOBER before I start shopping for costume ideas. Silly man. He's right to try, because clearly, when I start in August, it means that I buy something in August. And then possibly change my mind a few times, so that every Halloween, we've ended up with two or three different costumes for Frog. You know, for different purposes. The kid has more costume changes than Lady Gaga. It's a little ridiculous, I'll admit. I have a problem. There, I said it. But that's not going to keep me out of Party City and off the Costumes Express website next September.
See, he's just so damn cute. His first Halloween, we went first with a little comfy lion costume. He was only 6 months old or so and still really chubby. I had thought, ok cool, he'll be a lion and then I can be Dorothy and I'll make Aquaman be the scarecrow, DONE. But then I trolled around for Dorothy costumes and "sexy dorothy" was not gonna be appropriate for, well anything, and the only other option was "Plus Size Dorothy" and that was the frumpiest piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. I seriously think it was made out a vinyl picnic tablecloth. Either that of grocery bags from Aldi.
Anyway, we got his picture made in the lion costume (I don't usually post photos of my kid's face here but he looks nothing now like he did as a baby, becasue he was a pretty fat baby, so woo-ha, caution to the wind):
And that was really cute but then I had nothing to coordinate with it. And I needed to coordinate because a) there was a neighborhood fair and parade to go to and b) there was my office Halloween party to go to and c) it's a sickness. So I sold the lion costume on craigslist and searched for something else. Enter the pirate:
Arrrrrr. But that smile lasted about 2 seconds before we discovered the hard way it was too itchy and stiff. So, we went to Old Navy and tried on a nice, comfy, soft chicken costume:
Oh the humanity. Even at this tender age (get it? tender? chicken tenders? eh? eh?) Frog had an overdeveloped sense of injustice. I'm keeping this photo for use in his therapy sessions later on.
It's just as well, as I had no idea what I was planning to wear in order to coordinate with a chicken costume.
So, we finally ended up with a bat costume.
To coordinate with the bat, I was a vampire. Easy peasy since I'm really white and have straight dark hair so pretty much, all I had to do to be a vampire was wear black and put on a choker and some red lipstick. Et voila! I do not have a photo of the two of us in theme, this is yet another victim of the fact that my husband, though an art teacher, takes craptacular photos, so I do all the photo-taking and therefore am never recorded in pictures. Huh, kinda like a vampire.
The next year, when he was just under 2, I scoured the thrift stores for the raw materials to fashion a tiny adorable Luke Skywalker costume. I was rather proud of this one. I was Princess Leia to coordinate:
The next year, I lowered my standards because we actually closed on our sale and our purchase of the condo and moved on October 31. It was unavoidable. This is like if a normal Christian person was forced to move on Christmas Day, seriously, there was some gnashing of teeth up in here. Our wonderful new neighbor (also room parent of my son's daycare class, known to you as The She-Kramer or MashugaMom) picked Frog up from school that day and took him trick or treating with her son while we set up his bedroom, paid the movers, etc. He wore a lame-o doctor costume, though even then, it was a theme, because his friend was a firefighter, so it was an emergency services thing. And he looked adorable in his scrubs and white coat, though I have no photos.
This year, he actually started having his own opinions, so I had a blast "shopping" with him online for ideas of what we should. Unfortunately he's effing THREE so his opinions changed on a daily basis. Finally I cut him off, no more mind-changing, so in mid-September (extraordinary willpower to hold out so long) we ordered our costumes online. He wanted Star Wars. I got him the Luke outfit (not from Tattooine like before but Luke as an X-Wing Fight Pilot in the orange jumpsuit), and I had to re-purchase the Leia costume, at his insistence (I'd sold the previous one on craigslist, dammit). Together, we succeeded in convincing Aquaman to be Darth Vader.
Only problem was, when the box arrived, Frog was insistent that he HIMSELF was going to be Darth Vader. Uh....crap. So I (BECAUSE I AM BRILLIANT!!!) came up with a test. If he could wear the Vader mask for five whole minutes, he could be Darth Vader. It's amazing I got a photo of this....
because it literally lasted about six seconds. I AM EVIL GENIUS.
Luke wins!
And Aquaman got to hide behind his Darth persona, though he did have a quite a bit of flair when the wind picked up:
We're storing the Darth and Leia rather than passing them along this year. There are too many other characters he might want to be, now that he knows what Star Wars actually is, and I am not buying the same costume again. "We could wear this same theme every year," Aquaman said hopefully.
Honey, please. Have we met?
So, I was really just planning to do a little retrospective here, a funny and lighthearted review of our Halloweens so far, but in digging out these old photos, something different happened. I got totally choked up. My little munchkin was so, so fat and smiley as a baby, in that lion costume, and now he's, look, i know he's only three but he seems SO OLD. Look how skinny the body is that's stickin gout from under that Darth Vader mask. Three and a half years has gone by in the blink of an eye. Aquaman said to me the other day, "five more blinks just like this and he'll be in college."
Uguh.
He's already so mature sometimes, telling me "I KNOW that, Mommy!" when i try to tell him, um, anything, or getting upset with me and slamming the door of his bedroom (he did this so much one evening--I found out later, he hadn't napped at school, eureka!--that I actually went in there and calmly threatened that if he did it one more time Daddy was going to take the door off its hinges and he would not have any privacy. This actually worked, thank God.). He's such a teenager already, I feel like I have missed the baby part altogether. I totally get why people have another baby right about now; you want that age back. I really do. I have GOT to find a way to do less, to not stress about work so that I'm not doing it in the evenings when I should be enjoying family time, etc. Grad school being over with is a huge weight off, one less thing that takes me away from my kid. I have writen before about this: choosing "good mom" means beign a bad student and bad employee; choosing "good employee" means bad mom, etc. You are never succeeding at all of your roles at one time.
I find myself enjoying the times when my son is sick because not only do I get to stay home from work with him (Aquaman and I fight over who GETS to call in!) but my little boy becomes littler, more cuddly. Stays still for longer. Lets me cuddle him tighter. Stays still long enough for me to smell the top of his head. I had to go across country for a business trip a couple of weeks ago, and the first night when I called home and my son got on the phone, the smallness of his little voice took my breath away. He sounded so tiny. My husband got back on the phone. "Oh my God, he sounds like such a baby!" I exclaimed.
"He IS a baby," my husband said. "We just don't realize it anymore."
I forget that he really IS still small, that time hasn't run out. He may have gone from pudgy, smiley infant in a lion costume (and chicken costume, and pirate, and bat costume) to skinny, gangly boy who has his own opinion about what he'll wear, but his childhood isn't over yet.
I still have a chance to soak it up.
I just need to find a way to get more hours in the day, or slow time down a bit.
May the Force be with me.
Recent Comments