Because Dressing Up Is Awesome

In anticipation of the coming weekend, I’d like to use this post to reflect on past Halloweens for the Johnson Quartet.  Until my kids are big enough to be embarrassed to be seen with me, we will dress up as a family.  (I didn't dress up the first two years because I was throwing a pity party for myself because Scott was not there, but after that I stopped pouting and started wearing costumes.)

Will was almost two months old on his first Halloween, so naturally he was our little pumpkin:

Also, I’ve pledged from the beginning to try to encourage my children to be whatever they want to be, to not be one of those parents that has an agenda for her child’s life before he even leaves the womb.  But when it comes down to it, doesn’t every mother want her son to be a doctor?  (He waited for Daddy to come home to dress up in his REAL costume.)

In 2006, Will got this cheap little Curious George doll in his Easter basket, which became his go-everywhere friend (until we lost him somewhere about a year later).  So, it made perfect sense that since I couldn’t separate him from Curious George, he should be the Man in the Yellow Hat:

For some reason, this picture refuses to rotate, and I'm tired of fighting with the computer.  It's just as cute sideways as up and down, I promise.

So, I’ve shared that we are all Harry Potheads around here, and this was really the last year I could make Will be what I wanted him to be for Halloween, so we had a perfect little Draco Malfoy in 2007:

And here we are as Lucius and Narcissa (Bokonon was dressed as an owl):

2008 was the first year that I let Will decide what we would be as a family, and this was the result:

Yes, I am 8 months pregnant.  And yes, I went trick-or-treating like this.  And yes, Kim Kardashian decided to be Wonder Woman this year, too.  Screw you, Kim Kardashian.  When it was time to trick-or-treat, Will’s friend Cate joined us, which caused him to want a costume switch for trick-or-treating (very much in the spirit of Toy Story 2!).

In 2009, Will wanted to be superheroes again, so that was the plan...until we went to see Where the Wild Things Are about ten days before Halloween.  FYI, there are no Max costumes, and I have NO sewing skills.  None.  Well, I can sew buttons.  So, all of our costumes were made with fabric glue.

 

And check out Ben's 1st Halloween costume.  CUTEST.  WILD THING. EVER.

This year, Will has decided that he and Ben want to be astronauts (who knows what will happen when Ben has an opinion?), and he wanted Scott and I to be asteroids.  I talked him out of it because I was having flashbacks to making last year's costumes--all the glue and feathers and tiny scraps of fabric all over my living room...the horror, the horror.  So, I convinced him that martians would be a good idea.  His response?  "Well, you can do that if you want, but asteroids are way super cooler than martians."  (He is five, you know, which makes him the King of Cool.)