How Halloween went down at our house

Since we've been a family of three, I've been excited to come up with a family theme for our Halloween costumes, at least as long as I can still convince Cooper to wear what I want him to wear. Two years ago, we were a pirate family complete with parrot, and last year we were the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe.

This year started with a hand-me-down monkey costume. I decided that Coop could be King Kong, Alan could dress up like the Empire State Building, which would leave me as the damsel in distress. No problem.

I picked up a big U-Haul box for Alan's building, and Cooper liked playing with the smaller one I bought:

But then *gasp* I couldn't talk him into wearing the monkey costume. Here is the one and only time he had the whole thing on:

I finally bribed him with Smarties to put the top on so we could at least take a picture of him next to the Empire State Building. But he would only stand by the building if I was in it, which left Alan to be the damsel in distress, and he didn't much care for that role. So he took the picture instead:

It's too bad he wouldn't wear the costume out and about. He makes a super-cute monkey:

Instead, he insisted on wearing the little box I had cut for him. So he went trick-or-treating as Small Box from U-Haul.

( Parker's a bear.)

I'm sure people thought I was the laziest mom ever -- I didn't even try to make the box look like something. Oh, well...


As it turns out, Cooper didn't care that much about trick-or-treating anyway. We headed to downtown Lawrence to visit all the businesses, but Cooper much preferred watching all of the costumes go by.

Fine by me. No sense fighting him to go trick-or-treating when I would just spend the rest of the week fighting him to not eat candy!

Check out, by the way, some of Cooper's super-cute friends, all agreeably wearing their costumes:

Gus

Zooey

Christopher