Trick or Treat

Growing up I remember all of our homemade Halloween costumes. Give us a dress, fancy shoes, and a scarf, and we could be beautiful princesses. Or tie the scarf around our waist, add some gold jewelry, and we were Egyptian princesses. Hmm, those are surprisingly similar.  We used my mom's prom dresses, wedding dresses, and even just old, what we thought of as, fancy dresses.  A trip to the thrift store and we were all set.

The first year Jack was ready to trick or treat, I ignored the sage advice from my older sister and went and bought a costume. It was very cute, all warm and fuzzy, and he HATED it. He would not wear it no matter how much we bribed him. Instead, the day of, we ended up putting him in normal clothes, sticking a name tag on him and calling him "Earl". Get it, My Name is Earl.  No one else did either.  We went to a party and all the other kids were in serious costumes and there was Jack, running around looking pretty normal.

The next year I was going to have a real costume to make for him. But then it was Halloween and I had nothing. Since his brother was going to be Charlie Brown, I decided Jack could be Linus.  Pig Pen would have been better, but Linus gets to carry his blanket everywhere. Again, no on really got his costume since he was mostly just wearing normal clothes and carrying his blanket.

I was dreading this year. What would I do for costumes. We were talking about it in the car one day and Jack said he wanted to be a pirate.  A pirate, I could do that, all I need is a hat, sword, and some torn pants.  

But what would Micah be? Of course, what does every pirate have?  A parrot!!

I listened to my sister this time and bought a green hooded sweatshirt. Then I spent about 4 hours hand sewing on a billion (well, I don't know how many for real) felt feathers onto his sweatshirt.  Ta-da! A Parrot! 

Or a turkey as one woman guessed but that's okay at least she recognized he was a member of the bird family.