First Halloween

Thank you all for helping to make Jack B'hat's first Halloween successful. Jack was an adorable Tootsie Roll, though I had to convince him that wearing a costume was an OK thing to do.

I have to say that I was really looking forward to Jack's first Halloween. I dressed him in his orange pumpkin onesie and jack-o-lantern bib to go to Nanny Delaney's. I couldn't wait to pick him up after school! I had such plans - which also including picking up the house a little so that the neighbors would not be horrified by the crime scene that is my living room (I could just imagine them ringing the doorbell, "trick or ...what the hell is that? Did the earthquake do this? Shit, " and then running away so that the bug-of-chaos wouldn't bite them too.)

We got home and Jack was slightly fussy. I decided to take him for a walk. After all, we had plenty of time before Halloween actually started.. So I did. And as usual, Jack fell asleep in the stroller. When we got home, I tried to put him down for a nap, but he woke up and decided that his afternoon nap was a sham, he was mad as hell, and he wouldn't take it...anymore. Fine.

I put him in his chair a plopped him in front of the TV to watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, one of my favorite movies of all time. Jack watched quite a bit of it while I set out jack-o-lanterns, picked up and made his dinner. Right before I fed him, I decided to put the tootsie roll costume on Jack.. But there was a slight problem.. The costume wouldn't fit over Jack's ginormous head. He got stuck. And that, as it would for anyone, pissed him off severely.

Luckily, I am not too proud to ruin a perfectly good costume that I bought on line and could have saved for posterity. I immediately broke out the sheers and made the neck hole bigger. Then I took the sheers to the back of the costume and cut all of the way up. Who in the hell decided that it was possible to pull (what felt like) ten yards of fabric over a baby's head is an idiot. So, I split the costume, made lacing holes, found some string, and laced that bad boy up. It worked!

I fed the baby, put him back in his costume, took him outside to show him off to the neighbors, got the candy ready for the trick-or-treators, and nearly collapsed from being so exhausted.

Jack fussed for most of that time..

Rich got home around 7:00, just as I was making myself a cocktail. He held the baby as I reheated some soup and answered the door for the neighborhood kids - not one of whom ran screaming from our house. We bathed Jack and put him to bed.

And that was his first Halloween (and mine as a momma).