I'm a Halloweenie....

When I was a kid I, and my siblings, had some pretty cool Halloween costumes. One thing my family went all out for was Halloween, every year. We took turns having an elaborate costume. Now, elaborate doesn't mean expensive but it did mean time consuming and labor intensive.

1984: I was Bugs Bunny. Sounds pretty simple and I had the standard poly plastic mask but......I also had a cardboard box made up like ground with grass, a hole cut in the top and I would pop out and say, "What's Up? Is it trick or treat?" and take a bite of a real carrot. Cute.

1985: My brother was a mummy. Pretty classic BUT they made him a cardboard sarcophagus, painted gold and lavishly decorated, and wheeled him around on a dolly. Too cool.

1989ish: My sister went as a mermaid. Pretty standard. Little Mermaid was her favorite Disney thing of all time. However, the tail had its own wheels and her feet were decorated like sand and sea life. Very cool.

1991: The eyeball. Favorite all time costume. I went as an eyeball. My head was the eye and my body was the ocular nerve, complete with blood vessels. The eyeball part was paper mache and painted with glow in the dark paint and was bloodshot. So very cool. Trick or treating, I looked like a floating eye.

1993-1999 ish: my sister went as dead people. She would choose a person and then go as them dead. People she knew and by dead, I mean, zombie slaughtered. One year it was a dead cheerleader, once a dead paramedic, a dead doctor, a dead prom queen. In light of school tragedies and rescue workers heroics, these motifs are no longer as funny as they were. She still goes all out. Last year she as a martini and this year she's talked bunches of people into going as bees and they are collectively a swarm of bees. Cute.

As for me? When I was pregnant with Lil'Bug, she was due on Halloween. I was huge. The only thing I could fit in was a butter yellow cotton jumper. That was the year of the butter cow. Yes, I just told people I was one of Duffy's Iowa State Fair sculptures. :)

This year? I really wanted to have a Halloween party in celebration of living in the perfect haunted house (looks like Adams' Family house but with a gabled roof), but alas we are too busy finishing up house projects to get ready to list with an agent to even have time to plan a party let alone hide the laundry pile. So tragic. I had big plans too: Sprinklers on the roof for a rain storm, strobe lights for lightning, Creepy organ music playing over thunderstorm sound effects, cobwebs, dry ice at the double doors spilling out fog every time we opened the doors, and our family dressed as the Adams family. Bah. Someone should so steal my ideas and take pictures. Please. :)