Alternately titled ‘The year that Mom bought two costumes for each kid.’  Or ‘You want to dress as a what?’  Also known as ‘Missed Photo Ops.’

I’m still figuring out this Halloween Mom thing – and once again this Halloween felt a little bit by-the-seat-of-our-pants, disorganized, rush around, yet somehow still fun.  It began about a month ago when I asked Clare what she wanted to be for Halloween.  I was shamelessly plugging for her to be a cowgirl, based entirely on the boots, but she had other ideas.  She wanted to be a tiger.  Yep, a tiger.  And she wanted Sammy to be a lion.  I let my cowgirl dreams go (until next year) and ordered lion and tiger costumes online.

Well, besides just trick-or-treating, we attended the preschool-fest Monster Mash at the local community center a few weeks ago.  Unfortunately there was a delay in the costumes arriving and two days before the Mash we were costumeless.  I asked Clare what she would like to be instead of a Tiger.  She thought about it, tilted her head and said “ummmm… I would like to be a fly.”

Huh?  Come again?

“Yep, a fly.”

Then J jumped in and said “yeah, you could be a fly caught in a spiders web!”  About this point I was kicking J under the table.

So then I was tasked with finding a fly costume and somehow getting it caught in a spiders web.  Amazingly, and truly it felt amazing, I found a fly costume being sold on craigslist.  Even more amazingly the nice family was also selling a caterpillar costume so I nabbed two bug costumes for a small price.  A quick stop at the consignment store got me a baby bee costume and I had an assortment of insect costumes for my little Bugs.

So away we went to the Monster Mash, which was fun, though Clare was disappointed not to see any Monsters.  Sammy wasn’t all that impressed with his bee costume but  he was a sport about it.  Clare, on the other hand, was the happiest little fly you’ve ever seen.

But, if you’re paying attention to this caper, you’ll notice that we still have a lion and tiger costume on order.  They arrived a few days ago, just in time for trick-or-treating.  So tonight we dressed our kiddos in Costumes #2 and headed out with our neighbors to do some candy nabbing.  I barely got pictures of them in their costumes before Clare drug us out the door.  She took her trick-or-treating very seriously – running ahead of the group, banging on front doors, and chanting “get candy get candy get candy” under her breath like some kind of internal pep talk.