Halloween Over-kill

I really like Halloween. I think Halloween is a favorite holiday for my sister-in-law too. Before we all had kids she'd host murder mystery nights to celebrate Halloween, she decorates everything and has serious concerns about a zombie invasion. Not sure the zombie thing is related to Halloween, but she is a charming, funny writer. You can check out her blog No Gutzler, No Glory.

The main reason I like Halloween is that I get to dress up. Carl is really great about dressing up too. In fact, we met on Halloween in 2001.

Night Carl and I met

Carl was a flying nun and still loves that costume. He's worn it to Mardi Gras and any other occasion he can think of. This Halloween party was after the anthrax scare, so I'm a mail person with a mask and latex gloves.

One of the great things about having kids is dressing them up for Halloween and I like the family to dress in theme. Just one of the small perks of having kids. The twins were born in September and I didn't get organized enough to get us costumes for that first Halloween, but a friend hosted the 2nd Annual World Banana Day that February (benefiting North Texas Food Bank) and it was a perfect excuse to dress up.

The next year I had a little time to plan ahead, so the kids were bees. Dressed in khakis, Carl and I were bee keepers.

Halloween 2010

Then the plan for the next year was based on the kids really loving the zoo and animals in general. With Connor's crazy mane I thought he'd be a great lion and Chloe was a pink leopard. We broke out the khakis again to be big cat trainers.

Halloween 2011

So I'd been thinking about what to do for this year for awhile. I didn't think it would be fair for us to wear the khakis another year so I ended up with two ideas.

1. The twins could be a cow, horse, pig, sheep, some sort of farm animal, then Carl and I would wear denim overalls and gingham to be farmers.
2. The twins could be some sort of fish or ocean creature. I found really cute shark, whale, and lobster costumes. Then Carl and I would be fishermen. It'd be a bit harder, probably need yellow slickers and hats, but it'd still be a family theme.

The hitch? The twins don't want to be farm animals. They kinda want to be sharks or whales, but the problem is they can talk now, and they keep "saying" they want to be Spiderman. So Spiderman is one option. I let them look through a costume catalog and we came up with another solution. It's not a family solution, but here's my plan:

Chloe will be a rose

She said she wanted to be a princess, then a butterfly, but when I showed her the rose costume she happily agreed.

Today I bought some rain boots at Target. I have long rose garden gloves and I'll get a little apron to carry around gardening tools. Chloe will be a rose and I'll be the gardner.

Connor picked his own costume and he wants to be a dinosaur.

We'll just have to break out the khakis one more year, and Carl will be a paleontologist.

So ultimately I've gone a little over the top on Halloween costumes. After all, it is only one day and not even a day at that. One evening. But the main point of this post was to justify the time and money I've put into Halloween this year and I'm going to totally enjoy it!

This year's costumes were ordered from Chasing Fireflies.