Year < 1
We decided that we would for sure be doing family costumes for as many years as possible, until LittlerHill decided that it was too “uncool” to be part of a family costume any longer. It’s not so easy to figure out trick-or-treating with a small child in NYC if you live in a small building without other families, so for the first year with an 8 month old, we decided to go to a couple of Halloween parties in costume and that was it. I will spare the gory details of how we came up with the costume idea, but we decided to go as a beloved trio of characters from our childhoods, in a way that could incorporate babywearing.
Most parts of the costumes were home made, with the exception of the Mario & Luigi hats that I bought from Etsy, a play mustache for (Mama) Luigi, and a mustache pacifier for Baby Mario. Yoshi’s head was made from 3 balloons, some printer paper, tape, and markers. The rest of the costumes were clothes we already had – overalls for Baby Mario & (Mama) Luigi, green shirts/sweaters for (Mama) Luigi and (Dada) Yoshi, and a red shirt for Baby Mario. Instructions for the Yoshi head were adapted from something like this. This costume was super fun, recognizable, and easy to execute! Our borrowed Ergo was the only carrier we were comfortable using for back carries at the time, which was necessary for authenticity, and it worked great!
Year 1-2
Toddlerwearing was going strong, so we decided to incorporate it into our costume for this year as well. Since LittlerHill was mostly riding on my back at this point, we went with a “climbing”-themed costume. Again, trick-or-treating was not in the cards for us since LittlerHill came down with a fever halfway through the day, but we did make it to an indoor brunch in costume before the illness/grumpiness struck us down!
Again, most of this costume was homemade, except for the toddler gorilla costume that I purchased from Amazon. The sky and clouds were made from a blue shirt and white paper. We bought a bag of cheap Styrofoam airplanes and attached them to a mobile we had already, which was then attached to an old cat toy stick.
For the skyscraper hat, I wanted something I could make at home (in one night…), so I found a DIY Chrysler Building tutorial online. While not technically correct, because King Kong actually climbs the Empire State Building in the 1933 film, it did the trick and again our costume was recognizable to most people, and most importantly, super fun to wear.
The last part of the costume was the rest of the (Mama) Chrysler building and the wrap we used to back carry. I just wore a grey sweater, and used the grayest, building-iest wrap on hand, Tekhni Olympos Pewter, for a ruck carry tied with a candy cane chest belt.
