Belle And The Butterfly

I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid. Some of my fondest memories are of wearing a cheap plastic Chewbacca mask and matching smock and wandering the neighborhood with my cousins in search of candy. (I wonder if my cousins Joey and Sheldon remember the house that gave away comic books every year. We should have marked that place on a map with a big red circle.) You get older and Halloween becomes less of a big deal. Then you have kids and it becomes one of the most important days of the year.

This year Haley went as (drum-roll please) a Disney princess! Yeah, ok, so that’s not really all that big a surprise. (I was kind of hoping for Supergirl, but oh well.) Actually, I was kind of surprised by WHICH princess Haley wanted to trick-or-treat as. We’re currently going through a “Little Mermaid” phase, and I thought that an Ariel costume would be a given. But when she was asked, she selected Belle from Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. This is all the more odd when you consider that she has only watched that movie once because the Beast scares her. In comparison, I think we’ve watched The Little Mermaid enough times to wear down the DVD.

Haley’s friends Logan and Caspian came over to join her for Halloween. The split between “boy” costumes and “girl” costumes was very apparent this year. In sharp contrast to Haley’s bright yellow princess dress, Logan was the Black Knight and Caspian was a Ninja.

Zoe was a pink and green butterfly. Nicole might have picked out the costume this year, but Zoe loved it. We put it on to take pictures early in the evening before taking it off again. Several times before we actually went out trick or treating, Zoe toddled over to her butterfly costume and angrily demanded we put it back on her. She even got her first taste of a Tootsie Roll Pop when she stole one from the candy bowl and got it into her mouth before we could stop her. And if you thought she was angry when we took her out of her butterfly costume, you should have seen her when I took that lollipop away.

After the street was quiet again and the jack-o-lanterns were extinguished, Haley set aside her favorite candy and put the rest outside of her door for The Halloween Fairy. For those of you that don’t know about it, one of our Halloween traditions is that The Halloween Fairy takes that big bag of candy and replaces it with a toy. Haley doesn’t get upset that her candy has “disappeared” and we can all agree that the last thing she needs is sugar. (Uh… because she’s sweet enough without it? Yeah, that’s what I meant.) So this year, The Halloween Fairy gave Haley Ariel’s head. Before you go reporting me to Child Services (again) it’s a doll’s head with a suction cup on the bottom that comes with hair accessories so that Haley can change it’s hairstyle. Haley loves it and hasn’t put it down since she got it. It did lead to one of her legendary comments though – “Mommy, this dolly has no arms and no legs so I have to do everything for her. … And she has a suction cup for a bum.”