After Halloween last year, I went shopping and I got the cutest witch costume on sale for R. It was a little black dress with purple ruffles and matching hat. I thought it was a perfect toddler Halloween outfit. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this costume as we were getting out R’s fall clothes. I was excited to see them again. I showed R the dress and hat. She took one look at them and said, “No.” There was no emotion over it, just a quick, “no,” as in, no, that is not the dress for me. I tried a sales pitch, and I tried talking about Halloween, but, “no” it remained.
As luck would have it, later that week I had lunch with another mom at work, shared my story, and she just smiled. Her youngest is a super girlie girl and she had just the purple princess dress for us to borrow for Halloween. I was quite happy about that. And when I took the dress home to R, she loved it. She wanted to touch it and hold it and stroke it. So I let her try it on. She did not want to wear it. At all. As soon as I got it on, she took it off. The next night when I got home from work she grabbed my hand, dragged me to the closet, and begged to see the purple princess dress. She wanted to touch it and hold it and stroke it. She did not want to wear it. She didn’t even let me get it over her head this time.
Last Wednesday night I took R to a Halloween carnival at UNCW. It was a huge, chaotic event hosted for all area youth 12 and under, and it was free. The place was out of control, and it was filled with kids of all ages in all sorts of costumes. R loved it, and she was very happy to wear her regular clothes, despite the other kids being dressed up.
On Thursday, Jeff tried a new tactic. He asked R if she wanted to dress up like Abby from Sesame Street. Abby is a new character, and R worships her. She is a fairy with a wand and pig tails. What more could a girl want? By the time I got home from work on Thursday, R was very excited about dressing up like Abby. She was going to wear a fairy dress (the same purple princess dress) and carry a wand (the same princess wand), and she was going to say trick-or-treat. (I wish I could remember how she said it. It was quite cute!)
On Friday morning, she was still very excited. I had a regular check up on the babies scheduled, so while I headed off for that, she and Jeff ate breakfast and planned for the day. She remained very excited about dressing up like Abby, and we were quite excited that we could, once again, use our child to get us a nice supply of candy!
The plans for the day changed when I ended up checking in to the Mommy Hotel for the weekend (more on that in Trick-or Treat Part II). I told Jeff they still needed to go, since she was finally excited about trick-or-treating. He got her dressed up, which I imagine must’ve been quite an ordeal, and they headed off for the neighbor’s house. She got half way across the yard before she started pulling on her dress, trying to rip it off. This was not okay. This was not what she wanted to do. She wanted to put her regular clothes back on.
So that is what she did. They headed inside, she changed into her regular clothes, then our little grandma happily put candy in the buckets of all the kids who came by. For R, handing out candy in her regular clothes every time she heard "ding dong" was a perfect Halloween.
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