Distracting myself with my gorgeous daughter

Here’s Clementine at Halloween.

I got her the train engineer outfit because she was in love with the steam trains in Tilden Park all summer long. Choo choo was one of her favorite words (she talks a lot now, btw) and she loved to go and look at the engines and ride the train. I thought we’d take her up there on Halloween and get a priceless photo of her on the engine in her outfit. Naturally, after being fascinated with them all summer, on Halloween she takes one look at the loud belching, hulking thing and starts to cry. It might have been the stress of lots of scary stuff over the previous couple of days; Clementine is (justifiably in my opinion) terrified of people in masks, and there were plenty of those around.

Anyway, on Halloween we managed to lose her engineer’s hat, which was kind of key to the outfit (otherwise she looked like just a kid in overalls or, if she had the bandana on, maybe a farmer). So at the last mintue we tried to do a makeshift cowgirl get up with the adorable red cowboy boots Elizabeth brought her from Austin. But that was a no go; she would not let us change her clothes. Then Chris remembered the felt bug outfit I had found at the thrift store which could just go over what she was wearing and required few additional accessories. It was never clear what kind of bug it really was, or whether it might have been a spider (counting her arms, of course) but the one comment we got on it from another trickortreater was “Hey, look, that little kid is a cockroach!”