Halloween costumes, a creative process.
I have always loved that Halloween brings the opportunity to dress up. One of my favorite challenges of the season is figuring out a clever costume. Something that isn’t the top costume search on Google for the year. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just love a good creative challenge! Another shout out to my husband who willingly (most of the time) goes along with my costume scheming! We have been Eliiot & Gertie with our cat making an appearance as ET. Wendy & Squints from Sandlot with our cat once again making an appearance as the Beast. Most recently my husband was the Pike Place Market Sign, more on that later, but needless to say he is a trooper. Becoming a twin mom brought a whole new level of excitement to Halloween costumes!
Our twins were almost 6 months old for their first Halloween and we were still in the thick of pandemic life. During pregnancy I felt I spent an obscene amount of time coming up with costume ideas… Yet, here we found ourselves more exhausted than we could have imagined with literally no place to go due to a global shutdown. All my clever ideas just seemed like a waste, not to mention that I had infant twins. It was laughable that I thought I would have time to do literally anything. I ended up dressing them as the twin emoji! I wish I could take credit for this brilliance but I very much cannot. Another amazing twin mom gave me the idea and I just ran with it!
For their second Halloween I again began my process of coming up with an out of the box costume…when I say began my process I mean hyper-focusing and constantly running through possibilities in my head along with lots of Pinterest pursing for inspiration and google searching! I can’t even remember how I landed on the idea but being as we are from Seattle I decided they should be Pike Place Fish Mongers! One Amazon order of stuffed animal trout and a few yards of orange fabric and I was feeling very confident. Especially given that my children immediately seemed to be attached to the very lifelike fish stuffed animals and insisted on carrying them everywhere. Which truth be told was hilarious and a little strange, pretty standard behavior for a toddler. Since at the time I was bald (chemo) I made a hat covered in flowers, my take on the market flower bouquets, and a Pike Place Market sign shirt for my husband to complete our family ensemble. Halloween weekend we loaded up our family and headed to the market! The happy accident that I hadn’t expected from this costume was what a great experience it was. The Pike Place Fish Mongers were so kind and excited. Our girls had so much fun seeing them throw the fish “for the twins”. While I am sure they won’t remember this experience I very much will and I took enough photos to remind them of it for years to come.
Since I inadvertently set the bar pretty high last year for costumes I knew this year had to be just as great. After a visit at Grandma’s house the girls each came home with a toy Care Bear….not a new one mind you, one she had saved from when my sister in law was a little girl! My kids were smitten. They carried them around everywhere. When my sweet sister in law found out she dug out her old Care Bear stuffed animal and gave it to them…. I think you can see where I am going with this. Given their obsession I asked if they would like to be Care Bears for Halloween, with gleeful joy they told me yes they wanted to be Care Bears “big ones”! Can’t wait to share our Care Bear costumes in just one week!