My Personal "Flower"

I remember being so excited about my son Trio's first Halloween. In my mind I went through all the typical first baby costumes; a bumblebee, a little Devil, a little Angel. I was very excited that it was his first Halloween and because of various hospital stays this was our first holiday we could actually celebrate with him being able to go out and do something.

We ended up going to the Spirit Halloween store to find his costume on Saturday afternoon. We walked immediately to the baby/toddler costume section and found an abundance of costumes. I looked at the Shrek costume which my husband Albert immediately vetoed because "It looks like a sack". I found the cutest little Devil costume complete with a set of horns. However my husband was looking at another costume; a skunk. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to try that as it was really unconventional (and I had already been vetoed on the bumblebee costume as well as the Shrek) and it had a headpiece on it. I was worried that even though his face was exposed, Trio would had the idea of a hood like piece on his head.

So we held up the costumes to our then 8 month old son to see which one drew his attention initially. He immediately lunged for the skunk costume and held it with him in the stroller until we managed to make our way back to the dressing room. We put the suit over his clothes and he looked adorable. The costume had a tail on it and the sleeves left his hands free with the top white with pink nails to look like the skunk's claw. But the big task was still ahead of us. We put the headpiece on him.

Nothing. No fussing, no fighting, no crying. He seemed pretty content. And thus we were done as easy as that. Since he had liked the costume at first we didn't even try the Devil costume as we felt he had picked out his own Halloween costume and we would respect his wishes. He loved this costume so much we had to let him hold it as we walked around looking for costumes for us and he got upset and cried for a minute when I took it away just to adjust him in his stroller.

Since we wanted to match costumes with him we had to come up with something. We didn't want to be a family of skunks (and there were no adult skunk costumes) so my husband and I got a great idea. We took some of his old camouflage pants that he had while he was in the Marines and some green undershirts. On the back in black shoe polish my husband wrote "ANIMAL CONTROL" so when we went to his employee Halloween party and trick or treating our costumes were matching. Here was our own personal "Flower" who had his own Animal Control workers to carry him around to ensure he had a great Halloween.

While I never thought, "I want my son to be a skunk for his first Halloween" it ended up working on so many levels. He picked out his own costume which always makes a cute story as he gets older and my husband and I got to wear a unique costume ourselves to go with our sons, which we got tons of compliments on how cute it was and our creativity. While I know we have many more Halloweens to come I know this one will always be special in my heart for these reasons and more.