High-Pressure Halloween

I have friends that are all about Halloween.  They have their costumes all planned out before the end of September...and we're talking elaborate costumes...not just some store-bought superhero costume. They spend hours on the afternoon of Halloween applying face paint and putting finishing touches to fantastic costumes.  As much as I wish I was that person, let's face reality - it's never going to happen.  It's not that I don't have the creative desire to come up with fun, matching costumes for the entire family, but it's simply that I don't have the time.  So why not just buy the aforementioned superhero costumes and be done with it?  My creative (and frugal) side won't let me succumb to such measures.  The result is that the day before the Halloween costume parade at Caleb's school, we still don't have any costumes picked out.  Uh oh.
Thankfully, my sister was talking about what her boys were going to be, and I stole that idea from her.  Caleb will be a lumberjack for Halloween and the parade!  Yay - problem solved!

Except someone forgot to run that by Caleb.  He really wanted to be Mickey Mouse (which he decided the day before when it was too late to order ears and a tale online and when there were none left at the store.)  So the news (told to him the morning of the parade) that he was going to be a lumberjack didn't sit so well.  "You want me to wear what?  And carry what?  And put what on my face?," his skeptical look said to me.  After some serious bribery...er, persuasion, we managed to get him into his flannel shirt (with a sweatshirt underneath for "muscles"), suspenders, and hat.  He thought the ax Dad made was pretty cool.  But there was no way he was letting me put makeup on his face to give him the lumberjack beard.  After some tears and scrubbing of the face where I had tried to draw the beard, I threw up my hands and decided that people would get the general idea without the beard.

For Halloween night, he and I both knew that the lumberjack wasn't happening again.  So we just dressed all three kids in some glow-in-the-dark skeleton pajamas that we had received for a gift.  Easy.  Done.

 It wasn't the most original or creative costume selection, but they were still awfully cute little skeletons.  (And as a bonus, we had given them baths before we went out so that when we got home, it was straight to bed for everyone since they were already wearing their pajamas!)

This was Caleb's first year trick-or-treating, and, for the most part, he did a fine job.  His one problem was that he wanted to ring the doorbell and then run back to me waiting on the street, leaving the confused homeowners wandering who rang their doorbell!  Maybe he'll figure it out next year...

Until then, I resolve to have no more high-pressure Halloweens.  Maybe we'll just get matching pajama costumes every year.