the triumph of the five-minute costume

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Captain Lightening Bolt.

I came home from school to be told that Cal refused to wear his butterfly wings for the Halloween parade at school, so I knew that we were in some trouble if we wanted to try and go trick-or-treating that evening. So we just started randomly grabbing at stuff. The black shirt and pants, Cal already had on. To that, we added Cal's rainboots. A red stocking cap of Joe's that he got for a "Lust in Space" party in med school. Some construction paper. And thus, Captain Lightening Bolt was born. Not as cool as being bitten by a radioactive spider or being accidentally exposed to the blast from a gamma bomb of his own invention, but whatever. Captain Lightening Bolt, he is the Joe Six-Pack of the superhero world.

If you can believe it, this is the first time I'd ever been trick-or-treating outdoors (growing up in New York, we always just trick-or-treated in apartment buildings), so negotiating the temperature issue was a little bit of a sticky wicket. In the end, we just slapped a vest on him and kept it unzipped so that the lightening bolt icon could show. He looked like the most flamboyant cast member of "The Perfect Storm."

We only managed to hit about seven or eight houses before toiletting concerns drove us home, but considering that Cal insisted on sampling the wares after hitting each house, the sugar bolus was sizeable.

And in the end, despite insisting all night that he wasn't wearing a costume, he was just wearing clothes, I think he had a pretty good time.

(Full photo set here.)

first the cosby sweater, now this

It hit me suddenly at 3am last night (whatever, this morning) why Cal may have suddenly reversed his position on the wearing of Halloween costumes. Earlier last week, I let him watch "Little Bill," which is one of the shows on Noggin that I actually think is kind of cute and has some mild redeeming value. So far this list is short and just includes "Little Bill" and "Blue's Clues" circa The Steve Years. Not that I won't let him watch the other shows too, because lord, how am I supposed to get anything done around here otherwise? It's just that I'm muttering sarcastic commentary under my breath while they're on. For the record, because I know you are keeping one on what I think about sundry children's television programming:

• "Little Bear": Boring, old-fashioned, and Little Bear is a total weenie. Plus the disproportionately long arms on the animated bears creep me out, as they endow a certain marfanoid quality that I find distracting.

• "Dora the Explorer": Hate this show. Hate. I don't care if they're teaching Spanish or simian-human relations or any of that. They are always yelling everything. Why must they yell? Why can't they just talk?

• "Wow Wow Wubsy": Benign enough, I guess, and cute in that little Japanese animated character kind of way--you can practically see them as little erasers and bento boxes--but I am not fooled into thinking that it is anything other than pure brain candy. Cal loves it, though.

• "Yo Gabba Gabba": Watching this show makes me feel like I have taken a large dose of hallucinogenic drugs. In a bad way. Cal, of course, also loves this show.

But anyway, "Little Bill" I think is adorable. It's like an updated version of the Cosby Kids with no laugh track and less jive, about this multigenerational black family living in what looks to be one of the outer boroughs New York, though I think this is left purposely vague. The family dynamics are nice and the kids acts like actual kids, and they learn cute little lessons about, whatever, making sure your friends feel welcome when they sleep over, taking care of your pets, whatnot.

So. Last week Little Bill had a Halloween episode on, in which Little Bill wanted to dress up as Captain Brainstorm to go trick-or-treating, but the neighborhood store ran out of Captain Brainstorm costumes. "If I can't go as Captain Brainstorm," sulked Little Bill, "I don't want to dress up as anything." Then, a day later, Cal is telling us basically verbatim that he doesn't want to dress up as anything. Related? Coincidence? I don't know how the episode ended (I'm sure there were Compromises and learning about Disappointment, and that Little Bill ended up enjoying Halloween after all), but I don't think that Cal saw the end of the show either, which means NO LESSONS WERE LEARNED AT ALL.

Anyway, thanks, Cos. You and your wholesome family values teachings. Maybe we will just watch more "Yo Gabba Gabba" and go trick-or-treating as a giant red-studded dildo-looking cyclops.

i hope you understand this just means less candy for everyone

For the past three years, Joe and I have chosen Cal's Halloween costume for him, OVER-CONTROLLING PARENTAL INCLINATIONS and need to live vicariously though our offspring aside, for the simple reason that Cal had no idea what Halloween was, nor could he care less about dressing up. However, this year, he is a three year-old man, so I decided to ask him for the first time what he wanted to dress up as for Halloween.


CAL
(Promptly)
A butterfly.

MICHELLE
Oh, a butterfly! That's a nice costume. What kind of butterfly?

CAL
A pink one!

MICHELLE
(Not wanting to discourage the boy, though worrying somewhat about schoolyard mockery)
Well, I guess that should be easy enough to do...

CAL
(Reconsidering)
No, wait, a red butterfly. An orange butterfly.

MICHELLE
That is also easily accomplished.


This was about a month ago. So I ordered the wings and the antenna set (not a bad costume, considering it was only about $7.00 at the time), found his long-sleeved black T-shirt and a pair of black pants, and figured that we were set. Cal seemed to enjoy the costume well enough, and spent a few evenings flitting around the house, wings sprouting from his back, excitedly telling everyone who would listen (and occasionally some of us who stopped listening) that HE WAS A BUTTERFLY A BUTTERFLY A BUTTERFLY.

This past weekend, Cal had an actual Halloween part at his school, and we attended, thinking that not only would it be fun, but it would be a great way to get a little more mileage out of his costume. Except for one thing: Cal would not put it on. He put on the all-black outfit fine, but when it came to putting on the actual butterfly accoutrement, he balked. "I don't want to put it on yet," he said in the living room, "I want to wait until I get to school." At school, we figured it would be an easy sell, since every single kid in attendance was in costume--quite a few of which featured wings similar to his--but he continued to refuse. "I don't want to wear my wings," he said. "I just want to wear my sweater." Which is why he was the only kid at the party wearing a gray zip-up sweater and black pants. Just like an old man. We should have just brought some baby powder to dust in his hair and then that could have been his costume.

That was five days ago. To date, Cal still does not want to wear his costume for Halloween. "I just want to wear a regular shirt and pants," he insists. He is a very odd child sometimes. So, unwilling to spend any more money on costume elements that he in all likelihood will refuse to wear, I have been scrambling to figure out a costume for trick-or-treating consisting of normal clothes from his closet. Which is proving to be a little more difficult than you would think, as he has no novelty-type clothes that we could push into costume territory. He doesn't even have a pair of overalls.

So far all I could come up with was to dress him all in black, put on his black stocking cap, and give him a flashlight (he likes flashlights, so he would probably agree to carry this--though who knows, he liked the wings too) to pass as a cat burglar. However, unless I slap reflective tape all over his back, I worry that the dark outfit combined with outdoor trick-or-treating might not be the most traffic visible costume to test the notoriously bad driving skills of our Atlantan brethren. (My other idea was to take the all-black outfit and send him out with a book of e. e. cummings poetry. But this costume would perhaps be on the subtle end of the spectrum.) I even thought of dressing up as a resident again, same as last year, only we still have a ton of boxes from the move we haven't unpacked yet, and I'm not sure where his scrubs are.

Any last-minute costume ideas for an extremely stubborn three-year old that preferably involves spending no money and minimal craftiness?

29 weeks


The fetus, he grows.

So we're at 29 weeks here, which means that we have somewhere in the range of about two and a half months to go before we launch Cal 2.0, a.k.a. The Do-Over. In terms of my maternity leave, I am planning to use a mixture of vacation time, sick days, and unpaid leave to total six weeks, which is the amount of time I took off when Cal was born. Again, it is hard to say this knowing full well that I am going to be stepping into a GREAT BIG PILE OF SHIT in telling you yes, I have decided of my own volition, pressured by no one, that I will be taking but six weeks off after the birth of my second child. However, there are a number of constraints, both practical and financial, that have factored into this decision, the top two of which are that 1.) I am at present the primary breadwinner for this family, so I need to work and get paid for it, and 2.) I took six weeks off when Cal was born, and despite some introductory angst it worked out fine, and he still loves me approximately 85% of the time.

Something else that will make returning to work easier this time around is the fact that my schedule now isn't nearly as bad or unpredictable as it was during residency (though in an ironic twist, now that I don't take night call, I never have post-call days off, which actually makes it very difficult to schedule anything kid-related during the day, including my OB appointments). And yes, I know all you Europeans and Canadians get, like, five billion years of paid maternity leave for each child, and that's a whole other discussion to get people all hepped up, even though at present, in the U.S., paid maternity leave is really the exception rather than the rule--but whatever. We work with what we have, and right now, I'm happy to look forward to six weeks off with Cal and his new brother, and returning to job that I love in a practice where people have been nothing but completely warm and understanding about the whole situation.

As for the other baby...

I'm about to start on the second round of edits for "Scutmonkey," which, according to my editor, is slated for an early 2010 publication. That sounds far away I guess, especially since I submitted the manuscript this past July, but there's still a lot of stuff that still needs to happen between then and now, so I'm glad to have a little time to tune things up, especially now that I'm working and don't have time to be lollygagging with my laptop at Starbucks every day like I was earlier this summer. I'm aiming to get this second round of edits back to them in about a month's time, with the goal of finishing almost all of the hardcore overhauling before I have my human baby, and past the legal department and into the copy editor by (I'm told) April. Anyway, the gestation period for a baby elephant is 22 months, so as long as my manuscript is in pre-publication limbo for less than that amount of time, I guess I'll be happy.

(Though this probably does not need to be spelled out, I just wanted to add for the record that I'm glad I'm not an elephant.)