The story of the ghetto Halloween costume

I'm all about doing themed family Halloween costumes. GJ hates this. Hence last year, Peanut and I were the pea and the farmer and GJ was...the lame dad who hates dressing up. I've convinced him to go as Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash in the past as well as Dwight and Angela from "The Office." That's because those are people he LOVES. So I knew if I wanted to convince him this year, we'd have to go as something he loves.

My first idea was to go as Mario, Princess Peach and something small and cute for Peanut (the 1-up mushroom, star, Toad).

I would not recommend going through too many pages in a Google image search of "Princess Peach costumes" because you will come upon a gross amount of obscene anime porn.

For this same reason, I would also not recommend Googling something you think is completely innocent when making your costumes, like "Mario and Luigi" or "Does Toad wear a shirt under his blue vest?" (Learned: there's a surprising amount of gay fan art around Mario and Luigi and Toad does not in fact where a shirt under his blue vest...which proved to be a small problem when a baby girl would be wearing said Toad costume).

SO. This basically meant I found nothing that would work for any of us and I would have to sew all Mario-themed costumes. Of course, Halloween snuck up on me and, by the time a Stowell Halloween party rolled around last week, we had nothing.

I pitched:
Betty and Don Draper and baby Gene from "Mad Men" (GJ: Would that be one of those "Who are you costumes?")
Alice, Mad Hatter and rabbit from Alice in Wonderland (GJ: Too trendy with new Johnny Depp movie.)
Obama, Switzerland and the Nobel Peace Price (GJ: ...just NO.)

At this point, I was TICKED GJ was throwing out all my ideas, not pitching any of his own and we needed something last-minute.

Then GJ came up with something completely ghetto yet totally genius.

I now present, Happy Halloween from:







The contestants - and big red ball - from "Wipeout"
or
Dodgeball players
or
Kickball players
or
The abusive parents who dress their children up as a ball, then joke they're going to throw her at each other

...it worked. We cut up a red ball to put Peanut in and just got sweat bands for ourselves. Peanut actually won "Funniest kid costume" at a friend's party.

The best part of this costume was our constantly moving/screaming/squirming kid would completely freeze up and zone out every time we put this costume on her. It was like she took this "I'm a ball" bit a little too seriously.

I'm totally keeping the costume around to put on her when she's driving me mad.

*BARELY squeakin by for the first day of NaBloPoMo. Folks: remember, help me out and ask me a question here.