All Dressed Up and Several Places to Go

 Another October come and gone, and the kids made good use of their costumes this year. They wore them to a Gymnastics party last night, a walk around the town square this afternoon, and trick-or-treating this evening. I was reminded that I really don't like Halloween; it seems like a fairly dumb holiday, but the dressing up and the free candy I'll take, particularly the dressing up part. Society can have the rest.

Once again we scavenged our home, the local thrift store, and the internet for props and pieces. I finally remembered to ask them about their costume desires early in the season. While I can scrounge up what I need to at the last minute, it was nice to have the luxury for accuracy.

Mim wanted to be Professor River Song this year. For the uninitiated, River Song is the wife of The Doctor, the title character from the TV show Doctor Who. She is a no-nonsense, time-traveling archaeologist who makes good use of hallucinogenic lipstick, a good blaster, and her vortex manipulator to travel the universe, occasionally saving the Doctor, and occasionally being saved herself.

We were trying to re-create this specific outfit. Did we succeed? You be the judge, but don't tell me if you think we failed. I couldn't take it. We did curl her hair as well, but it would've taken a lot more hairspray and a lot more time than I was willing to put into it to get those curls.

Zaya dressed as Dr. Erwin Schrodinger, the quantum physicist who famously postulated the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. If you want more details, follow the link to the Wiki page. His box there contains a "cat". (It's a plush lion because it was the only feline that fit.) He couldn't bear the thought of killing the cat, so he wore the vial of radioactive poison (glow-stick) around his neck in the evening.

His costume was occasionally mistaken for The Doctor (The eleventh Doctor, specifically.) and Harry Potter. It's understandable given the bow tie for the first and the round glasses for the second. At least one person thought he was dressed up as "a nerd". What can I say? Who am I to argue? He makes an awfully cute little nerd. I'm sure the real Schrodinger's mother thought the same.

We went around our little neighborhood with some next-door friends and another homeschool family. Most of the other kids were fairly shy, but good ol' Schrodinger came up with enough chit-chat to make up for the other seven quiet characters. At the very first house he yelled, "T-R-I-C-K to the power of treat," to the poor unsuspecting home-owner. River Song gave him a don't-embarrass-the-rest-of-us wallop, but I don't think it was effective. I decided to hang back with the other parents and let him be himself. River kept him in line, more or less, anyway.