Nothing Spooky Here

  
I’m not one for scary Halloween stuff. I never liked haunted houses or slasher movies. I’m much more to cleaver or cute Halloween costumes. I remember one year when our club had a Halloween party and I was too tired to come up with a costume. As I looked around my very messy bedroom for inspiration at the last minute it came to me. I took a plastic laundry basket and cut a hole out of the bottom that was big enough to fit over my body. I tied some sneakers and slippers to the sides of the basket and draped people magazines and some laundry over it. When I got to the party with my basket full of crap around my body I told the costume judge I was there as my bedroom floor. I won the contest.
When Carter came around I used her as my costume model. Thinking up and making costumes was something I did for months before Halloween. For Carter’s first Halloween as a non-walker I made her a dragon fly costume which was comfy enough to wear in the jogging stroller. Her second Halloween she was a garden, a soft sculpture version that she wore like a smock, her third year a scrapbook made out of cloth with real photos of her life printed on the material.
Carter’s fourth Halloween she wanted to have input and requested to be a bride. That was the year she had an invisible husband as well as a boy in nursery school who asked her to marry him. When she told me that Conner had asked her at school one day I asked her what she said in reply to his proposal. “What could I say? He asked me right in front of my husband.”
The years of my having any say in her costumes is long past. This year she has had two, a school girl with her friends and “Oh dear.” With her face made up as a deer and a shirt that says OH on it. It is much better than the combination I would have come up with for a shirt that said, “OH.” Of course I don’t know how to make an “OH S#%?” costume.