The Never Normal

about a month ago i bought jonah this little lion costume – one of those pull-down-over-the-head plush outfits with a lion-mane hood and attached tail. it was 10 bucks at kmart, and i was all proud of myself for having secured my toddler’s halloween cutie costume early.

then comes a few days before halloween, when andy and i suppose we ought to try it on the kid. we coax jonah over toward us and proceed to put the lion costume over his head. well lemme tell you the child went nuts. we kind of forced him into the damn thing and the whole time he’s screaming and carrying on like we’re beating him or something. finally it’s on him, and he’s all running around the room with this adorable lion costume on and a pissed-off tantrum face roaring out distress.

andy and i can’t help laughing, but of course we take the stupid costume off jonah. the three of us decide unanimously to ditch the whole jonah-as-lion-(or-any-other-costume-covering-the-head)-for-halloween idea.

now i have to come up with a costume for my son and i have two days to do so. luckily, i’m a halloween freak, and i have three boxes of random halloween costumes and accoutremens (or however the hell you spell that word) in our basement. There I find a cavewoman costume I wore a few years ago. Instantly I know I’ve hit pay dirt.

Jonah was the perfect Caveman!

I jaggedly chopped two and a half feet of length off the over-the-shoulder-leopard-print-plush-costume and tied it around Jonah with a makeshift “sash” created from the spare material. I even cut up an old t-shirt in fred-flintstone zig zag edges and he wore that underneath.

I handed him the perfect-for-a-kid brown plastic squeaky-toyish “club” and smudged his face with some old eyeliner I found in a drawer. After wetting and moussing his hair, he greedily touched and messed with it, creating the perfect caveman mussed-head effect.

Plus Jonah’s a grunter, so it seemed as if he were some genius kid consciously acting the part of caveman!

We had fun, he and I. I wore a plush mouse-head with ears and painted whiskers and a nose on my face. I was the only mother who came in costume. come to think of it, jonah was the only kid there in any kind of real costume too.