Today My Little Girls Are Vixens

It all started innocently enough some seventeen years ago when my husband and I put our little three month old bundle in a Santa suit for Halloween. Her name is Lucia and we thought it would be cute to remember our little "Santa Lucia" on her first Halloween. By the time she was a toddler this dimpled darling was surrounded by a large, soft pumpkin outfit sewn by my older sister. Our pumpkin, how sweet. At age two she wanted to be a Dalmation, too cute, and she gamely trick or treated alongside her older cousins, Dracula and a kitten. When our second dollop of love arrived I dressed the new baby in the pumpkin suit and thre three year old ventured forth as a princess for the first time.

Those were indeed the days, chubby little hands clutching buckets decorated as jack o lanterns and dimple cheeked children in brightly colored 'kid' costumes. Even when my son was little we dressed him as Winnie the Pooh on his First Halloween and he rode in hte wagon behind the cute little witch and the curly haired fairy princess. My younger daughter continued to be a version of fairy princess (damsel, Disney characer, etc.) from the age of two through five, when she took a break to be a sequined Holly go LIghtly.

But this year the kids are 11, 14 and 17. Baby brother has a very scary looking werewolf costume, replete with furry claw gloves. When he came out of the dressing room at the costume store I was truly frightened. Little did I know it was just the beginning of the scares to come when the girls, who are often mistaken for twins although they are three years apart in age, came out of the dressing room one after the other. My dimple chinned, princess had transformed into Ann Margret in "Kitten with a Whip", her long, long legs leading up into the shortest "Supergirl" costume I had ever seen. The long red boots only made her look that much more like a languid vixen and that much less like my rosary reciting, swear jar keeping angel. At least, I thought, as older sister emerged to nearly blind me with her womanhood in a tight Wonderwoman mini costume, at least little sister doesn't have breats yet. But big sister does. Oh my...

The girls were thrilled with how they looked and the teenaged salespeople in the store were no help with all their cooing. Seriously, these are my babies. They still wear plaid flannel pajamas on winter nights and sip cocoa before snuggling into bed. They are not Linda Carter and, I don't even know who played Supergirl, Helen Slater maybe. Honestly they both looked a lot more like Julie Newmar as Catwoman to me - long legs, shapely bodies, mischievous eyes.

I had to calm my nerves before bed by looking through old phot albums of the two of them side by side year after year in cute, little girl outfits. I had to focus on the little girls they once were and not the statuesque women who think they will be going off into the night in two weeks dressed in less fabric than their baby costumes. No, that's too horrific a Halloween nightmare to even contemplate. I think I'll just go put Psycho in the DVD player and think happier thoughts...