by Mamma G
I don’t know why most of us Mommys do it, but we pretend June Cleaver is a realistic role model. “To be a good Mommy, I gotta have at least a little June Cleaver in me!” is the inner voice so many of us guilt trip over.
I can’t say I’m innocent. Look at this picture of my daughter so many Halloween moons ago. Yes, that’s a homemade costume. I bent coat hangers to make the wing frames. I sewed the dress from scratch. Glued on all the tiny beads. How many hours did it take? Probably about twenty or thirty. At a paltry five bucks an hour, that makes this a $120-$170 fairy suit. Not counting the actual $30-40 bucks I spent on materials.
Yikes!
There’re are a whole lot cheaper ways to dress your kid for Halloween! Don’t feel guilty about buying something ready made.
If you want some of the fun of a home made costume, do something simple. Even if I had purchased just the wings and still made the dress I could have saved myself time, money and stress.
In my experience, children-especially tiny ones-don’t care nearly as much about what they wear for Halloween as their parents do. You can still have the joy of piecing together a costume with your child by buying a few separate components and adding a few creative twists, like tail feathers. But take it from me, obsessing over a fancy costume isn’t worth the trouble. Of all the extra work I did as a parent, making costumes was one of the more worthless efforts.
The best thing you can do for your child is to spend friendly, fun time with them. A costume doesn’t have to be any fancier than a paper sack in order to accomplish that. Time to put June Cleaver back in the time machine. Besides, how often do kids end up wearing their coats for trick-or-treating? Just what a stressed out June wanna-be needs, the guilt of having to cover up that darling costume with a worn out overcoat!
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