Sugar Babies

I have to say (again) that it is astonishing how many people are (still) googling "tornado costume." And the folks googling it this afternoon are really under the wire, as it were. I should give them the idea we finally came up with, since Brian has decided (are you ready for this?) that he wants to go as a bat after all. A bat. Not a tornado. Larry and I are definitely going to eat that kid's candy first.

So here we are, Halloween day, and the kids are already so sugared up that they can't see straight. For starters, I totally ran out of breakfast comestibles; so I fed them apple pie for breakfast. Then, they spent an hour this morning stuffing candy into treat bags (don't ask why we bother doing that - tradition, all right?) while freely sampling it to make sure it was okay. Later, Rachel bumped her head somehow and got a popsicle, so Brian and Susie had sympathy popsicles - the really junky kind that come in a box of 800 for 2 dollars and are comprised of food coloring and sugar and water. I think I managed to fit some real food in there for lunch, but my friend brought over ghost-shaped marshmallow thingies for dessert. Like bringing coals to Newcastle...

So...only 3 more hours to trick-or-treat. The baby has been screaming for candy pretty much non-stop today, and I myself am on Almond Joy overload. Now everyone is just dancing around in their costumes and asking when they can go out. Even jaded Anna is dressed up (and not as Medusa, as Theo had suggested). Whew - I don't know how much more of this I can take. I didn't even bother planning dinner. Nothing like making the kids sit down and eat something healthy when every other minute someone is at the door asking for candy. It's like trying to have a Weight Watcher's meeting at the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

David's robot costume came out great. All we had to do was cut some armholes in a box and cut a few pieces of dryer duct whaddayacallit, and he did the rest (which, um, fulfills my definition of a great costume, I guess - when the kid does the work). Rachel is a fairy princess or whatever you call a person wearing a very pink, floaty dress with a pointy pink hat. And toddling Susie is a round little pumpkin. But she refuses to put any clothes on underneath the pumpkin costume. Which makes it fairly risque (I mean, for a pumpkin) - spaghetti straps that tie into bows on the shoulders and nothing on the legs. Aside from the fact that I worry she will be too cold, I don't want to be one of those accused of sexualizing little kids' Halloweens. One minute they're innocently dressing as almost naked pumpkins; and before you know it, they're pole-dancing for college spending money. It's a slippery slope, isn't it?

Theo is thinking of dressing up, too - as a plumber (what can I say? Rachel's antics last year have really inspired him, career-wise). Why should he go to college, he wonders, if he can make all that money fixing toilets?

Time to go whip up some chocolate bars for dinner.

Butterflies are made to fly....

Well, I seem to have tapped into some cultural zeitgeist for Halloween here. You would not believe how many people out there are googling "tornado costume" (and landing on my blog). Larry's still working on the costume concept here - he hauled home some heavy-duty plastic fencing from Home Depot. I think chicken wire would have been more malleable, but Larry said it was too sharp. To which I said, "So?" These kids should suffer a little for all that candy, don't you think so?

Where was I? Oh, yes, so today Larry was attempting to demonstrate how he was going to make this not very bendy fencing into a tornado costume by wrapping it around Brian's body, like so (and here he executed a very interesting pirouette while attempting to surround himself with the aforementioned material and I still can't believe I didn't have the camera handy). It's always a little scary when Larry takes over the costume design. Maybe it's a guy thing, but he heads to Home Depot instead of Michael's and tends to end up constructing costumes that are, well, very heavy-duty. The year Anna (age 8 or so) wanted to be a butterfly is a good example. Larry obtained some very heavy cardboard and cut out wings and spray painted the whole thing yellow and black (he even studied a picture of a tiger swallowtail in our butterfly book for guidance); in short, he worked a long time and made some very impressive-looking butterfly wings which spanned about 3 feet across and over 2 feet from top to bottom. He then proceeded to fasten them to Anna's little back by securing them with some heavy duty cables around her tiny waist, at which point, of course, she burst into tears. Because the costume didn't exude that flitty, floaty butterfly effect that she was after. She ended up wearing it (what choice did she have, after all the work that went into it?), but we had a real problem with her knocking smaller trick-or-treaters over with the wings as she turned around on people's front steps. And she never dared ask to be a butterfly again.

So, I'm really curious to see what Larry comes up with this time. Whatever it is, you can rest assured that it will be sturdy. And original. Stay tuned....