Baby’s first Halloween, October 2005

In 2005 I made a Halloween costume for the then-6-months-old E.

I took a blue romper, painted 0s and 1s all over it with fabric paint, and, in addition to that, cut out numbers 2 and 0 out of sparkly self-adhesive paper and stuck them onto the romper. So, E was dressed as Version 2.0. Of me, that is. Even if, biologically speaking, that’s only half-true.

But I never used fabric paint before, and didn’t know how to work with it, and managed to pick the worst possible kind of paint: the glittery kind. It shedded little particles of glitter everywhere within 2 meter radius. Glitter got smeared all over the fabric. So the costume looked really messy. And the sparkly adhesive paper did not stick to the fabric very well.

And, as a Not A Detail-Oriented Person (TM) I flubbed the execution of the costume by not making the “2.0” logo in contrasting color so that it would stand out in the background of 1s and 0s, and by making it so big that part of it was always covered by my arm when I carried the baby around. I took E to a trick-or-treating at my work, but people could not clearly see the “2.0” and could not tell what this costume was supposed to be. Several people guessed “bits and bytes”. Then I had to explain it to them, pose the baby just the right way so that “2.0” would be visible, and apologize for the crappy execution.

But I was able to take a few pictures before the adhesive parts fell off.

Here are E and I at the trick-or-treating at my then-workplace.

E and I in the group of coworkers and their kids; I cropped out everybody else to respect their privacy. The kids were sitting on and in front of a couch in the office breakroom, while the parents were standing behind them.

This is the zoom-in of the previous picture. Notice what E is doing to the fairy wings of a costume of a child sitting in front of her.