The Seductive Pumpkin

We got to celebrate Isaac's first Halloween last weekend!  We didn't have to put much thought into his costume this year since my mom had bought him a pumpkin suit last year, when he was still living happily in my belly. 

Now, although a pumpkin outfit might seem perfectly innocuous, as my family knows, it's not a neutral choice.  There's a whole backstory here, tied to a photograph in my office of two little girls standing a living room, ready to go trick-or-treating.  One of them, dressed as a ballerina princess, beams while she shakes her wand gleefully.  The other, dressed as a pumpkin, smiles weakly at the camera. 

You see, one year when my sister and I were kids, my mom decided to make our Halloween costumes (which is probably something I'll never do for Isaac).  She told us that we could be whatever we wanted, and she would make us a costume for it.  Jen decided to be a ballerina princess, probably so she could lord it over all the other ballerinas. 

I wanted to be a triceratops--which, coincidentally, I had also recently chosen as my future career.

 My mom, probably thinking of how impossible it would be to make a triceratops costume, told me that, actually, what I really wanted to be was a pumpkin.  Fast forward more than twenty years later, and now my son is also a pumpkin.  And  I have to say, he pulls it off much better than I ever did.

Look at him, in one of his new favorite poses!  Have you ever seem a seductively posed pumpkin before?

But next year?  He'll probably be a triceratops.