Trick or Treat! Would you dare open your door to two such nefarious characters? Take a second look at the smaller mug:

Well, don't let this delectable looking Gingerbread Cookie fool you. I used to call her "the Brute" back then. She was nearly kicked out of her Montessori school a year later and there are dents around the house from the ferocity of her tantrums.

This costume also proves that I always seem to have food on my mind. For my son's first Halloween, he was a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, which was rather ironic as he soon developed a bad peanut allergy. He used to go ring each doorbell and say, "Trick or Treat I can't have any candy with nuts or eggs." The conversations that ensued made for slow going on Halloween night. I made my daughter into a Gingerbread Cookie for her first Halloween, and showing she knew a good thing when she saw it, she asked to be a Cookie again for her second turn at trick or treating.

I used a store bought generic clown/bodysuit pattern, light brown heavy fleece, 4.5 yards of thick cream rickrack, 24" of pink satin ribbon, elastic for the wrists and ankles, velcro for the hood, a zipper for the back, and some deep purple fabric for the raisins. Follow the directions on the package but attach the rickrack before sewing front and back together. I made the raisins by taking a circle of fabric and just scrunching it into a wrinkly oval and sewing it together before attaching it to the costume.

I was so worried about my little morsel getting cold that I made this outfit as warm as a woolly coat. Of course my daughter had a metabolism like a furnace and she got rather sweaty inside it. But she looked good, and as she in her present incarnation would opine, that is all that matters.

Where's that can of Raid when you need it? We really thought our son would turn out to be an entomologist at this time, as there was nothing he loved so much as insects. So it was no surprise when he asked to be a potato bug for Halloween. I bought a black turtle neck at the consignment shop, and used material scraps I had already for the rest of the costume. I basically sewed a pillow in the oval shape of a potato bug, glued on strips of black for the stripes, and time always being short, simply pinned it to the back of his shirt. He was of course adamant that an insect had six legs, so I sewed two tubes of black fabric, stuffed them and pinned them to the back of his shirt as well. I also put a loop on the ends to slip over his wrists so he could wave all four arms at once. I attached some pipe cleaners to a headband for his antennae.

"This is good stuff. How 'bout we slip out and do a few more blocks while Mom's asleep?"

Happy Halloween!

Jody