all hallows
Costumes are important for us, and the boys were all very definitive about what they wanted to be for Halloween this year. Harvey: Ninja. Zion: Asterix. Lijah: whichever cute Pokemon he had last looked at in the Pokemon book. With Leah very busy with work and other matters, I took the reins of the costume construction, and, with a great deal of assistance from Leah on certain points of difficulty, managed to produce three acceptible costumes.
what great costumes!
You see that Lijah settled on Monkey over the weekend—not a Pokemon at all. Thank goodness, I say. We already have a couple of monkey costumes, but with all the fuss we were making over his brothers' it seemed only fair to give him a shot at something new too. He liked picking out the fuzzy fabric.
Zion's Asterix costume was the one I was most excited about. I think it came out very well indeed; that picture doesn't even do it justice (Zion was pretty cold, sleeveless, but I made him take his sweatshirt off for the photo). Harvey said, "he looks like a real person with cartoon things." I agree.
For his part, Harvey did most of the work on his costume himself, from designing at attaching his math-themed ninja logo to making his own nunchucks. I can take credit for the mask and the swords—he could have done swords, but he put it off too long ("Dada, I feel like playing with Lijah is kind of like helping..."—true enough!) and only I can manage a pair of wooden katanas in half an hour before we need to leave.
Because we were on a deadline to trick-or-treat at the farmers market in Lexington—we wanted to be there anyway, so why not pick up some treats along the way? Then we ventured into the maelstrom of costumed kids down the street in the center of town, where along with about 500 other kids they happily took candy from local merchants. It was quite a scene.
crowded with revelers
We noticed with some sadness that out of those 500 we could only see three other kids with home-made costumes. Knowing the joy they took from having something created just to their specifications, the boys felt a little bad for all the poor children who had to be content with something off the rack. At least everyone got enough candy.
We certainly did, but of course that was only the first portion; then we had to hurry home in time to welcome our friends who were joining us to trick-or-treat in our lovely walkable neighborhood. (Out of the eight kids in our group there were five home-made costumes—a much better ratio.) The kids made us go out before dinner, so as our time on the quarter-mile loop stretched out over an hour we started to get a little hungry; everyone was glad to get get home and sit down to a pot-luck dinner. Then the kids ate lots and lots of candy and got really loud, so I don't remember the rest of the evening.