Happy Halloween!

Being the planner that I am, I started asking Griffin in early September what he thought he wanted to be for Halloween.  His newest interest/obsession is Star Wars, and he said he wanted to be R2D2 for Halloween.  I started looking for an R2D2 costume online and could only find one in toddler sizes (and it wasn't even a good one).  There were plenty of other Star Wars characters, but he really wanted R2D2...so then I decided that I was going to make him a costume and set out looking for ideas and materials.  I went everywhere I could think of trying to find the perfect "body" for R2D2.  I never did quite find the perfect thing, but I settled on a barrel that Griffin & I found at Lowe's (some sort of drainage thing?).

I'm not sure that the pictures do justice to the final product--I know I'm probably biased, but it did end up being really, really cute.  When we went trick-or-treating, we didn't get any questions about who Griffin was dressed as...but we did get lots of comments on what a cool R2D2 costume it was...and a lot of questions about what it was made of.  So before I show you how it turned out, here is how it started.  On the left is the barrel as it looked when I bought it (turned upside down).  On the right is after I cut the opening and drilled holes to put straps on it.  It still had a LONG way to go to become R2D2! 

 

After lots of spray paint, rolls of blue and silver duct tape, foil lasagna pans (shaped into his legs), plenty of hot glue, and more hours than I want to add up, it ended up looking like this.



 

 Griffin liked ducking down inside of it so that his face completely disappeared. In the picture above, I caught him half-in, half-out.  In the picture of the babies below, you can see Griffin (or, rather, R2D2) in the background.

Last year, the babies didn't even wear costumes--I just decorated their stroller because I knew they wouldn't be getting out of it.  This year, they were big enough to get into the Halloween spirit a little more.  They got to wear costumes at their school earlier in the day--Baylor was a tiger and Hudson was a frog.  Griffin had worn one of these pumpkin costumes for Halloween when he was about the same age as the babies now.  I had found the exact same costume at a consignment sale earlier in the fall so Baylor and Hudson got to be my "two little pumpkins."  They didn't do any actual trick-or-treating (once out of the stroller they would not want to go back in so they just stayed in), but they did get some special treats from Mimi, Weezy, and Pop & Chaz.