The leaves are turning and Halloween is approaching. The final touches on the costumes will need to be finished up in the next few weeks. Besides candy and treats, Halloween comes down to one thing: do you take
the time and energy to make your child a beautiful homemade costume this year, or do you buy a prefabricated costume at one of the many chain stores. In this day and age there are really no easy answers. Making a homemade costume can be expensive. Time consuming and expensive are certainly two strikes against the idea of making a homemade costume. Then again, you want the best for your child, right? You want them to win the best costume prize at their school. You take pride in your inherent creativity. In the end it just depends on what exactly your child wants to be for Halloween.

It seems that boys always want to be one of three things for Halloween. They either want to be a one-eyed pirate, a fireman or a cop. A cop costume is easy to prepare. What exactly do you need? For a cop costume you need a blue shirt, a pair of blue pants and a badge. The badge is the key to the costume. It can be one of those star-shaped badges, which is actually more like a sheriff in an old Western than a cop, but that is fine. Of course, any young boy who wants to be a cop for Halloween is going to want some type of plastic gun to hang on his side. See if you can interest him in a state-of-the-art speed detector or a megaphone instead. The cop costume is neither expensive to make or time consuming, but convincing your son to be a gun-less cop will be difficult.