Flashback Friday

This story is sad (as in pathetic) but true and it's taken me 23 years to go public with it. October 31, 1989 was Peter's second Halloween. By that time I had left my job in San Diego and started working in Newport Beach (closer to Brad's job), so Brad and I had our Oceanside condo up for sale and we planned to buy a house in Mission Viejo (close to our jobs) once our condo sold. In the meantime, the commute from Oceanside to Orange County was long, so during the week we shared an apartment with my sister Kelle in Mission Viejo. Well ....... on Halloween, Peter went to his child care provider as usual. Brad brought him home that night and Peter had a paper towel tied around his head and a felt patch over one eye, so he looked like a 13-month old pirate, all courtesy of the wonderful woman who watched Peter while we were at work. It was adorable. And we had nothing to do with it. We had already started to think about leaving Southern California (Brad had started to apply to business schools), but for me this was absolutely the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Newly pregnant with John (and probably hormonal), seeing that someone else had dressed Peter up for his second Halloween made me cry (after my parents, pictured with Peter, had left and, by the way, they don't normally dress like cowboys - this was their Halloween costume). And it helped give me the resolve to make a change happen. By the next Halloween, Brad was enrolled at Cornell, I had a family-friendly job in Ithaca, we were happily living a much better life, and ......... I sewed Peter a fabulous pumpkin Halloween costume which Harrison kids went on to wear for more than 15 years afterwards (thanks to Mary, who wore it as late as high school!). As for baby John, by the time we got to Ithaca we did have two kids, and for his first Halloween he wore a skeleton onesie costume that was obligatory for every Harrison baby on his/her first Halloween.