With Halloween coming up shortly I’ve found myself once again facing another example of how having a baby changes your life. 

Before a baby Halloween meant going to a party full of fun Halloween themed drinks where you wear the weirdest/most offensive costume you can imagine while your significant other dresses in something outrageously sexy. Anyhoo…after a baby, for their sake, you have to dress in something totally benign like, oh, I don’t, the man in the moon or Alf or something.

So…before I totally forget the fun Halloweens of my carefree twenties I thought I’d run through some of them here:

COSTUME #1: A WOMAN…

Okay. This Halloween actually sucked. You see, in my early twenties I was talked into dressing as a woman by an ex-girlfriend. This sounded like a really easy costume initially as she already had a wig, and we only had to buy a cheapo dress at “Ross Dress For Less,” but upon getting to the party and seeing all the other guys strutting around in macho outfits like a soldier or O.J. Simpson I felt pretty lame. Making matters worse was the fact I was by far the ugliest girl at the party. Sigh.

 I don’t have a photo of this disaster (thank God) but here is some azzhat dressed as a chick:

RATING FOR APPROPRIATNESS AS MADDIE’S DAD: 2/10

Two may be too high a grade. I don’t really know how I’d explain tranvestism to baby Maddie.

COSTUME #2: A PRIEST

The next time I dressed up for Halloween was with Heather. We were due to go to some big party somewhere (Halloween booze dims the memory) so we went to the local costume shop to find something to wear. We ended up with me dressed as a priest and Heather dressed as a sexy Catholic school girl. We had a great time, and Heather looked great, but again, I don’t know how I’d explain to Maddie my dressing as a priest.

MADDIE: “So you were making fun of priests? Of God?!?

ME: “No, well, sort of. No!”

Maddie cries.

RATING FOR APPROPRIATNESS AS MADDIE’S DAD: 3/10

Yeah, still not something I want to wear around my baby (and I would definitely have to explain the WAY drunk expression in the above photo), but still better than dressing as a lady…and still better than this other Catholic priest costume I saw out that year:

COSTUME #3: KEVIN FEDERLINE

When Heather lived in New York I flew out for Halloween and we went to some party in Time’s Square dressed as Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. We were both very skinny here. We got fat and happy when we were together again.

RATING FOR APPROPRIATNESS AS MADDIE’S DAD: 5/10

The main problem here would be explaining why we were dressing like white trash, and why I was holding a beer. STILL…it is way easier to explain than the previous two.

COSTUME #4: RON BURGANDY

I’m pretty sure this was my last adult costume I wore before Maddie. It, I think, was from 2006…you see we didn’t celebrate Halloween ’07 as Heather was in the hospital. That is, unless, you consider Heather as being a patient for Halloween and me as being a worried dude. If you count those as costumes, then we were the best patient and worried dude ever. But I digress…the year before all that madness I was Ron Burgundy from the film “Anchorman,” and this costume, if I do say so myself, was pretty cool…

 Nonetheless, explaining the ever present glass of Burgundy would be sort of hard to explain to my little girl.

 RATING FOR APPROPRIATNESS AS MADDIE’S DAD: 6/10

So those are some of my pre-parent costumes. This year I will be wearing a costume that will receive a 10/10 rating of appropriatness as Maddie’s Dad. But you will have to wait for a future post to see what it is!