Silly Monkey: A Halloween Post

The Halloween celebration began for us on Sunday. That’s when Marcus carved one of the pumpkins we’d bought the weekend before while Emrick observed.

We waited until it was dark, and then we put a couple of tealights inside of it and placed Marcus’ Jack-O-Lantern on the porch.

Emrick has been fascinated with candles — and the idea of blowing them out — ever since his birthday last month. Every night since Sunday, Emrick has asked about lighting the pumpkin, just so he can blow it out. He also says goodnight to it every night. “Night, night punkiss,” he says. Cuteness factor: infinity.

The other thing we did last weekend, besides carve a pumpkin and get it on the porch, is spend effort on deciding what kind of costume Emrick would wear. We wanted to take him trick-or-treating for the first time. Marcus’ work was going to be holding an informal Halloween shindig from 3:00 to 5:00 and kids were invited to come and trick-or-treat from office to office during that time. So we planned to take him to that, and possibly take him to a few houses on the street as well.

I had been getting Halloween emails from Pottery Barn Kids advertising children’s costumes, and some of them looked pretty cute. For the toddler set, they had things like lions, dinosaurs, and bears (oh my). They were a bit too expensive for something he might only wear once, but it did give us the idea that if we found a cheaper costume of an animal he knows well and likes, then that might be a good idea. Marcus suggested a monkey as a good possibility, and I agreed. Emrick does a brill– er, um — comical monkey impression, so a monkey suit was what I decided to keep my eye out for, though I was open to other things as well. Last Friday, I made a couple of stops with Emrick. First we went to one of those temporary Halloween stores and looked around but didn’t see anything suitable. Their stock was getting low, with no more shipments to come, and the few things that seemed doable were not in his size. (This Halloween store proved interesting in other ways, but I will save that for another post!)

Next we hit Target, which I had browsed a couple of weeks earlier. They were selling a toddler garden gnome costume, which I could just see Emrick looking completely mind-blowingly adorable in, but I also knew there was no way he would wear the beard that came with it. But then I saw a monkey! There was just one left, and it was in his size! The best part was that there was nothing covering the face. It was basically a monkey suit with a hood. And the top of the hood was shaped like a monkey’s head. In fact, here is the exact costume I bought:

This costume seemed like a good choice. Nothing would be covering Emrick’s face, and even if he didn’t want to wear the hood, he would still be recognizable as a monkey without it, thanks in part to the banana sewn onto one of the hands. Plus, it cost about a third of PBK’s cheapest costumes, so we were winning all around!

Of course, it did occur to me that maybe Emrick wouldn’t be into it… that maybe after a summer of shorts and t-shirts, he wouldn’t LOVE being shoved into a puffy brown sac of misery. And because Marcus and I thought we ought to be prepared for that possibility, we decided to give the costume a practice run on Sunday night. We let Emrick touch and look at the costume. We showed him the picture of the baby on the front tag (same as above) wearing the outfit happily. We tried calling it an “outfit”, “pajamas”, “jacket”, and “monkey jams”. Nothing we said could convince him to willingly get into that suit. He just kept saying, “No” over and over, and he wouldn’t accept bribes. Finally, I said to Marcus, “Let’s just do this.”

So we swiftly slipped him in and zipped him up, while he whimpered. He didn’t get into a full screaming fit, which gave me hope that he might learn to like the suit in a few minutes. After getting it onto him, we stood him up, at which point he immediately began searching for the zipper. “Off, off,” he whimpered. Then we decided to take him to the bathroom down the hall so that he could see himself in the mirror. Surely once he saw what an awesome monkey he was, he would come around! So off we went.

I snapped this one and only picture because I knew that he might never wear this thing again. After I took the photo, we took him out of the monkey suit. He was wearing it for not even five minutes, I would say, but it wasn’t fun for him.

On Monday, I thought maybe I would try again, thinking he might have gotten used to it. So at one point, while Emrick and I were playing at the table in his play room, I decided to bring up the monkey costume in a sly way. “Hey, Emrick,” I said with a big smile. “Remember your monkey costume? Wasn’t that fun?!!” His face dropped, he looked at me, then shook his head and said, “Off. Off. Off.”

Hmm. Okay.

Later, in the evening, I squealed, “Hey Emrick, Let’s get on your monkey jams!”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “Off, off.”

And then one more time, in case he wasn’t clear, “Off.”

So, we never tried putting the suit on him again. On Tuesday, I went back to Target to look for something, even if it was just Halloween-themed pajamas. I had other things to get, too, so it would be easy to take a quick look around. For some reason, though, Emrick wasn’t having it that day. He was impatient with having to sit in the cart, impatient when I stopped to inspect and choose laundry detergent, and impatient when I attempted to browse the toddler pajamas section. He was screeching, and demanding things, and standing up in the cart (even though he was buckled in tightly — the kid is Houdini). I finally gave up, checked out quickly with my toothpaste and deodorant, and left. It was rough. And it must have been rough for Pookie, too, because once we were back in the car, Emrick looked at me with a hopeful face and said, “Daddy home soon?” … It was noon.

I had already figured out by then that whatever Emrick’s costume, it was going to have to be something that felt like regular clothes to him. That evening, I was trying to think of something, and I remembered this little black leathery jacket that Grandma Sorensen had picked up for Emrick last year. Of course, at the time it was still too big for him to wear, but I had been saving it in his closet ever since. Just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, I had tried to get Emrick to wear it, just for fun, but he wasn’t interested. But still, just the idea of the jacket got me thinking of doing something like a 50s greaser look. Blue jeans? White T-shirt? Gelled up hair? Yeah, that could work. I didn’t have any plain white tees for him, so this Halloween morning we went out and bought a 5-pack of toddler sized Hanes undershirts (I couldn’t find just a single, plain, white, short-sleeve tee-shirt there in the store). After Emrick’s nap, I put on his outfit, used up the last of Marcus’ hair gel, and then plopped him in the car and headed down to Marcus’ work. I had the leather jacket in hand, too, just in case I could coax him to wear it for a picture or two.

When we got there, I tried to put the leather jacket on Emrick while we were in the parking lot, and miracle! He let me without any objection whatsoever! Obviously, this was all meant to be.

Anyway, I took lots of pictures of Emrick’s adventures today (and it is after midnight), so I will continue this saga in a second post on Thursday night!