the good old days

A couple months back, Kitchen Retro posted this advertisement for Nitey Nite. Squinting shows that the company offered patterns that the creative mother could use to make her children’s nice, warm, normal sleepwear into fruits or vegetables — a watermelon and radish, respectively.

Now, I’m not a crazy obsessive crafter. Indeed, I don’t manage to turn out more than about six projects a year. But I do make my kids Halloween costumes. This started a few years ago, out of frustration more than anything else.

When my daughter was born, I joined a baby group. All the mothers had their first children with a couple months of each other, so it was a great way to hang around with people going through the same childrearing problems at the same time. I got equal sympathy over stressful days at work from both the working and at-home moms; they were all very supportive of whatever your job situation was, all except for one… we’ll call her Martha.

Martha was nice enough, but had a compulsion to turn every conversation towards how she was totally amazing and coped with so much to make her house a wonderful place to live. She’d ask how my day at work had gone, and I’d end up hearing about cupcakes she baked with her daughter that morning, and how wonderful it was to be home all the time. Whether she meant to or not, she was incredibly judgmental towards the other moms who weren’t — for a wide range of reasons — unemployed. And it pissed me off.

So when Martha started talking about Halloween costumes in August, I made my stand. I bought a pattern and fabric and spent two months making the worlds most beautiful witch costume ever — purple satin underdress, poofy purple and black tulle skirt, and a black satin overvest. It was fucking awesome. We bought a pointy hat and a little broom and she was just the prettiest witch ever. Martha’s daughter handmade costume — a cute leopard print shirt, sewn-on tail, and headband with kitty cat ears — was adorable, but uninspired. That’s right, I can optimize a production process all day and still make a better costume than you when I get home, bitch!

Ignoring my incredibly immature motivation, I’m pretty pleased with the witch costume. My daughter has worn it three times now. Last year I made my son a black cat costume so he’d match big sister. This year, she suggested he be a pickle instead.

And that’s how I’m neatly tying in my competitive costuming obsession with vintage sleepwear ads. See how totally awesome that tie-in was? I can search for engineering jobs on Monster all day and still write a better blog post about toddler pickle costumes than you, Martha!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under fashion, just plain weird, raising children, random self-love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.