A Costume Evening...

As I’ve said over and over again, our lives are ridiculously busy.  Until you’ve been in the shoes of a parent with multiple children in multiple activities, you just can’t understand what it’s like to have every single second of your days consumed by something.  Something as simple as running to the grocery store needs to be planned in advance because there is no “open” time in our schedule just up and do it.  This is why I do most of my shopping online.  Whenever something needs to be purchased, my immediate thought turns to “can I get this online?” 

So it’s almost Halloween and the kids (most of them anyway) need costumes.  Kylie had found the one she wanted online.  Perfect!  But Josh had no idea what he wanted to be, so I suggested making a trip to the costume store so that we could get ideas.  That’s a great plan at 7:00 PM on a Sunday night…when on earth would we have time to do that?  Luckily, there was one night this week we had nothing going on, so we made a plan that as soon as we got home from work on Tuesday night, we would go to the costume store!

The kids had been looking forward to this since we made the plan.  But I swear, “something” is always out to stop us…it never fails.  John e-mailed me late in the afternoon Tuesday saying that he was working on an issue and didn’t know when he would be home.  This was an issue for two reasons: 1.) my car barely, and I mean BARELY fits all the kids, and 2.) trying to shop for anything by yourself with all four kids is really difficult (mainly because of Colton and his “I all done” every two seconds and trying to get out of the stroller).

So I went home and decided that I would make dinner, and after dinner, if John still wasn’t home, I would pack all the kids in the car and we would do it.  But thankfully, just as we were about to sit down to eat, John called and said he was on his way home :)

So after dinner we headed out.  I honestly haven’t ever really taken the time to look in a Halloween store, and I really had fun walking around with the kiddos.  There were some cool decorations that I would love to get when the kids are older (poor Kylie was terrified whenever we walked past some of the scary things).  We were there for a little over an hour and Kylie tried on three costumes and found something wrong with each one.  Josh found the costume he wanted, and Ryan got the sword he wanted to go with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume he was re-wearing from last year.  Kylie couldn’t decide on anything, so I told her to go home and really think about what she wanted to be (she has a history every year of picking out a costume and then hating it, and then I fight her to wear it to her class party and for trick-or-treating).  So for $66 we came away with Josh’s costume, Ryan’s sword, and the make-up for Ryan (green hair and blue for his eye-mask).  Ridiculous!  But, it was a fun evening and we don’t seem to get many of those anymore :)