It’s October 8th - less than a month ’til LA Fetus’s due date, and less than a month ’til the most important of LA Toddler’s food holidays - Halloween! I’m still working full time and hoping to until the end of the month so this means I’m in a constant state of planning out every day. As LA Daddy pointed out this morning after careful observation over the past couple of days, I’ve got about one daily “event” in me and then I’m whooped. Today was “trip to Target day.” Target is easily LA Toddler’s favorite store. Where else can you ogle and caress hundreds of different bags of candy, countless toys, shoes, hair accessories… and most importantly for this trip - Halloween decorations and costumes!!! She had a blast holding decorative ghosts up to her face and looking at people and shouting “Boo!” This was a huge hit w/ the shoppers and I wished I had a video camera.

We managed to tear her away from the decorations and get to the costume aisles. She was amazed - wide eyed and smiling, “WOW” was all that she could say. She walked along the aisles looking at and touching different costumes for a while until we said she could pick one if she saw one she liked. We had come to the store with the intention of getting a witch costume. It’s been a long and thoughtful process, this Halloween-costume-choice-thing. About 2 months ago she bounced out of the hallway and announced “I’m a cereal!”. She was wearing a small innertube around her waist and it did resemble the cheerios she’d eaten that morning. So for about 2 weeks we’d planned on putting her in a white sweatsuit (the milk) and painting the innertube to resemble a cheerio. I was so proud of her creative mind!

Then about 3 weeks ago she decided she wanted to be a ghost for Halloween. We quickly realized she’d gotten this idea from her Clifford’s Halloween book. You see, Clifford tossed a sheet over himself and was the biggest and scariest ghost in town. So we started looking online for ghost costumes - LA Toddler was not impressed with any of the scary ghosts and Casper was too friendly looking. So we explained that we’d put a sheet over her shoulders and paint her face white so she’d look like a ghost. She pouted and shouted “NO GHOST - I’ll be a witch!”

Today we poured over 3 or 4 witch costumes, but since none actually came with a broom attached she wanted no part of them and announced she didn’t want to be a witch. She was going to be a princess like Cinderella. Great! Let’s check out the Cinderella costumes - there were 2 to choose in her size but neither satisfied her. “I want to be a princess LIKE Cinderella.” She didn’t actually want to BE Cinderella. OK. Good thing for us there was an entire wall of princess dresses in every size, color, fabric… fairy princesses, halloween princesses (apparently adding orange toile to a black witches dress makes it a halloween princess dress), ice princesses… you get my drift. We finally ended up with a “Winter Princess” dress. It’s adorable and I can hardly wait to post pictures of her in it… but that will have to wait until the big day.

Finally, I’m pulling for throwing a white sheet over LA Daddy and letting him be the biggest and scariest ghost in town. What do you think?