Reese told me in the beginning of October that she wanted to dress up as Laurie Berkner for Halloween. Realistically, this gave me plenty of time to make her a costume.

However, the week of Halloween I still had nothing. We had two Halloween parties to go to that week and last minute, with the promise of a Laurie costume for trick-or-treating, I was able to convince her to wear her Elmo costume from last year to the two parties.

Come Halloween, I still had no Laurie costume, and planned to totally half ass it and let her hold a microphone and put her in a dress and convince her she looked just like Laurie. I figured she was too young to care that literally no one would know what the hell she was.

At breakfast that morning she announced that she wanted to be a ghost for trick or treating instead.  Jackpot. All I had to get was a white sheet, right? Like an idiot, I scanned Pinterest. No white sheet ghost costumes there! Wtf. Most of them required sewing, and all of them made me feel like a crap person for not putting more thought into this whole thing.

That afternoon I stopped at a Big Lots on our way home from the library and looked for a white sheet. When they didn’t have any white sheets, I threw out the idea that she be a rare turquoise ghost instead for only $6.99. She happily agreed. And I patted myself on the back for pulling one over on a three-year old.

Then I started to feel bad. All she wanted was to be a ghost. Probably the easiest costume ever. The least I could do was make her a recognizable ghost.

At 5 PM the sun was going down and there were talks of white trash bags and suffocation hazards.

Our cream-colored drawstring laundry bag sat folded on our dresser.

I put it over her head and she was sold. I probably only have one or two more years left of being able to get away with stuff like this.

I haphazardly cut arm and eye holes in the bag and then had to keep making the eye holes bigger until everything lined up. By “lined up” I mean that she could see, most of the time, and had about 80% arm usage.

James rocked a hand me down panda bear costume for his first Halloween, which was amazing because 1) it was free, 2) it required nothing else, just a fleece suit that zipped right up with panda bear head included.

All night Reese’s “costume” kept shifting when she would run, momentarily blinding her. She would run across someone’s lawn, the bag would move and she would fall, get up, start running again, and fall again. This went on all night, much to our amusement. It may sound cruel but before you judge I will tell you that despite what the pictures may lead you to believe, she was the happiest ghost you ever saw.