Happy Halloween!

There's somewhat of a tradition in our family that we make our Halloween costumes. The one I remember most was a dinosaur costume my mom made for me when I was in elementary school. Each spike on the back and tail was made by cutting out cardboard triangles (I imagine from cereal boxes) and sewing yellow fabric on top. The mouth/jaws were made of styrofoam (meat packaging?) covered in green fabric. And I had a giant green dinosaur tail. As we got older, we made our own costumes. In high school a good costume was essential, since our band marched in the town's annual Halloween parade. One year I was a turtle, complete with a giant shell I created out of coat hangers, shrink wrap, and spray paint. Another year I was a bat, another costume created with coathangers. One year I even dressed up our pets. The dog was a "dog in sheep's clothing" and the cat wore a Halloween bandana.

So, as Halloween approached, my mom had high expectations for the little guy's costume. Though I was feeling pretty exhausted, I knew I had to come up with something and it had to be good. The little guy has brought us so much joy and laughter we knew the perfect costume. Growing up, my Grandpa would always tell us, "Say something funny!" And the required response was, "Kangaroo!" I have no idea what the origin of this was, but it always resulted in fits of laughter from all of the grandkids. And so we decided a kangaroo would be the perfect costume.

It took several trips to the fabric store, as someone enjoys the fabric store just about as much as his daddy does. The first time we looked at patterns, but started to have a meltdown before we could decide on which one to buy (of course there were no kangaroos, so we knew we'd have to choose one that could be easily modified). The second time, we picked a pattern that included a skunk, began to pick out fabric (me calling the hubby at work and asking him to Google "kangaroo" to help me pick out the right fabric color). We put the bolts of fabric in the cart and went to get a number. Our number was 94, and they were only on 84. The little guy found this quite distressing. One woman even offered to trade her number with ours, but I decided we'd better get out of there fast and get home for his nap (and my telecommuting hours). We checked out with just the pattern and decided to come back another day. On our third trip we got all of the fabric we needed (and conveniently had several 40% off coupons, so maybe the little guy was looking out for the family budget on the earlier trips!). Little did I know, that would be the easy part.

I took the sewing machine with us on vacation with the goal of making the costume in the evenings. We cut out the shapes, then traced them and cut out the fabric, and then went to start sewing the pieces together. After some more research on Google (and some not-so-family-friendly language) we managed to thread the machine and get going (it had been awhile). We finished vacation with what we thought was the left side and right side of the body sewn together, but not yet to each other.

About a week later, I revisited the project and was very puzzled. If the sleeves were to go where I thought they needed to go, then there was a major problem: the "sides" were actually front and back, and the legs were thus sewn together. It was time to call in the help of my mom. Hubby went to a Metallica concert with a friend, and the little guy and I drove to Grandma's house for the weekend. My mom's first reaction was, "Where's your seam ripper?" and I got to rip seams while she cooked dinner. That evening, and the next morning, we got the costume straightened out and I came home with the body, complete with sleeves, pouch, and velcro closure. I would be on my own for the feet, wrists, tail, and headpiece.

I'd like to say the rest went smoothly, but one night I was watching Grey's Anatomy a little too closely, and had to again rip out some seams and start again. I finished the morning of our playgroup's Halloween party. Originally I was also going to make costumes for the hubby and me, but I was pretty fed up at this point. On Halloween night, I decided we couldn't stop by a friend's party without a costume, so I quickly sewed some ears and pinned some white fabric to our baby carrier. We wore brown shirts and went as a kangaroo family. It was a lot of work, but for the first time in awhile we actually finished something. Our nursery doors aren't painted, our living room has wall patching along the ceiling, we can't park in the garage (and as a result, our car's radio recently was stolen when it was parked in the lot), there's a layer of dust/dog fur/cat fur on everything, and our to-do list is so long it's too depressing to even write down, but hey, we had some good Halloween costumes!