A quick history: last year the O’Donnells dressed up for Halloween as a family—Jones was a dragon, Jamie was a princess, and Bryan was a castle—and, thinking that that was the best thing ever, we decided that we would give family costumes a try next year (i.e., this year). And, for the record, Jones’s costume is unbearably cute again this year. Seriously, genius.

I found a infant Chewbacca costume on the Web and knew that it would be perfect for us (i.e., just geeky enough to entice Jason to be involved—wait, that came out wrong). So we decided to go as Han Solo and Princess Leia (and, no, I never considered the other Leia costume). We then kind of forgot about it until a month or so ago, when I started asking, “Are we really going to do costumes this year?” almost daily. We went back and forth and back and forth. We had picked up a military jacket at a thrift store that we thought might work for Han, and I found a bath robe that I thought would be good enough to suggest Leia (after all, I figured all eyes would be on the little Wookie anyway), but then we neglected to order the most essential items (a blaster for Jason and a wig for me). At one point we decided it was just too much effort and expense and had decided to ditch the costume idea altogether (except for Simon’s, which we had already purchased).

Then, for reasons he never explained, Jason decided last Saturday that we should go for it after all. We spent most of that day running around town trying to find pieces parts that would work. We ended up renting a gown for me, so I was set, but the night before Halloween when Jason tried on his costume for the first time, we thought we might have to abandon it after all. The problem was that each part of his costume—jacket, shirt, pants, boots, holster—was just a little bit off, which was no big deal except that when you put them all together the sum was WAY off, and not at all Han Solo-like. We ended up tweaking each part just enough that the overall effect was quite good in the end, I thought. The costumes certainly weren’t perfect, but we had a lot of fun.