Bananas On Parade

It has been a busy couple of weeks with the new baby.  He is learning to use his lungs and bowels as weapons and, so far, he is in the lead for the baby/adult offensive bodily function arms race.  All we can do is try and decipher what his cries mean and just try and deal with the expected, yet somehow always surprising, poop detonations that occur.  I think the angel baby phase has worn off.

But it is not all poop and noise.  We had a great time last weekend at the Grant Park Lantern Parade.  Mom, dad, and uncle all dressed up as giant bananas while the little dude was decked out in his too-big-for-him gorilla costume.  Grandma and Grandpa showed up to act as pit crew for the stroller as well as to supply us all with snacks and glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets.  He was conked out in his stroller so instead of waking him up to get his gorilla hat and gorilla onesie on, we just sort of draped it across him and hoped that he wouldn’t thrash about to such a degree that his costume got dislodged (spoiler alert: he dislodged the hat at some point towards the end of the parade and I’m sure some lucky park worker found it the next day and thought it was a truly unfortunate road kill scenario).

Baby Mac (as I will refer to him from time to time) slept through the bulk of the parade.  He was unperturbed by the steady drumbeats of the band; he dozed through the dozens of people who came up to him and expressed their appreciation of his (rad) costume; he didn’t bat an eye at all of the flash photography which occurred throughout the night to document his cuteness.  He stayed calm and cool through lantern malfunctions, stroller possession (where the stroller suddenly goes perpendicular to the direction of expected travel for no discernable reason whatsoever and pretty much only when I was at the helm), and the increasingly vocal complaints of his uncle (who’s back started hurting about ¾ of a mile in). 

Overall, and despite losing his gorilla hat, my nephew did great and the whole family had a lot of fun marching along with the other 600 or so becostumed locals.  All in all, I would have to categorize the parade as a success, although it would have been awesome to end the evening at a bunch of food trucks or a beer garden (or both).  Maybe I’ll have to fill out a comment card or something for next year.

The Lantern Parade definitely whetted our appetite for Halloween, though.  We spent a few days hitting up grocery stores to stock up on bags (and bags and bags) of fun-sized candy to pass out to all of the trick-or-treaters.  While Mac may have been the star of our little show at the parade, he slept through the festivities on Halloween.  He missed out on his dad and I setting up strobe lights and fog machines so that we could disorient and distract the children who walked up the driveway long enough for us to mount a two-pronged scare-ambush. 

Mac’s dad would wait until the kids were close to the porch before he would jump out from behind a shrub and yell, “Happy Halloween!”  Once the kids were done jumping and screaming from that and they had their candy from the dish on the porch, I would come shrieking out of the shadows and fog from the side of the garage with my hockey mask and glow-in-the-dark fake plastic cleaver, chasing them back down the driveway to their families.  The squeals of terror from the kids and the laughs from their parents were well worth the raspy voice I had the next day.  Only two or three more years before we enlist my nephew into our Halloween plots to frighten the neighborhood children.  I can’t wait to see him in a gorilla suit and a hockey mask.

The next first holiday for him will be Thanksgiving, which is one of my personal favorites.  I saw an excellent turkey-themed jumper (complete with waddle and beak) at a store here the other day and I am probably going to have to buy it for him.  In between now and then, though, I hope to take my nephew out into the big, wide (but local) world and show him around.  Anyone out there have some suggestions for baby-friendly shops, stores, or eateries?