Mutts 2012

Those of you who are further removed from our lives probably saw this coming. We turned into some sort of crazy cousin parent offspring to pageant moms.

I thought of this as I made my mental checklist for stuff to take to the dog parade on Saturday: string. check. safety pins. check. duct tape. check. makeup.

Makeup was a new wrinkle this year, and I think we have to give it credit for our second first place ribbon in as many years. That's right, losers. We're gunning for a three-peat.

(See? I'm a pageant mom.)

But I always go into these things thinking that the pain-in-the-ass aspect of it isn't worth the fun that we have. I remember all of the futzing with trying to make dogs keep wigs or hats on their head. Add a one-year-old and little time to prepare, and to be honest, I dreaded this from the starting gun.

We through together a float on Sunday morning. It was a wagon, turned into a rolling jail. It was a lot more flimsy and shitty than it was when I pictured it in my head, but since it was housing The Joker, the effect kind of worked.

So yes, the baby was The Joker, and we went back to a set of costumes from a few years ago, with Vanya as Batman, Lily as Robin, and Blossom resurrecting her role as Wonder Woman, in the same costume that I bought for Halloween 2004. No one can say that we don't get our money's worth out of a Halloween costume. Why we don't find a cool little place on Government Street and open up a costume shop, I'll never understand.

I have the whole photo gallery posted here, but there are a few pics that go into my folder of all-time favorites.

Our friends Andy and Danielle were walking around downtown Sunday morning, and one of them remarked, "Oh, look at that scary Joker baby! Who would do that to their kid," realizing as the sentence completed that they knew the scary family.

The fact that I'm already thinking about how we three-peat (even considering scouting Barkus in New Orleans for ideas) has me worried that we have truely become scary people.