Every morning, when we ask my son what he wants to wear today, he says “Gabba!”

Every day. No matter that we’re deep into fall and his “Yo Gabba Gabba” shirt has short sleeves. He wants to wear it every day. I kind of suspect that he thinks “Gabba” means “clothes.”

“What do you want to wear today?”
“Clothes!”
“You got it, kid!”

But this Halloween, we took him at his word and went one further with his request. He wore a full-fledged DJ Lance Rock costume.

Now that he’s just over two years old, my son finally has a little bit of awareness of Halloween, unlike last year, when we forced his oblivious barely-one-year-old self into a monkey costume that didn’t quite mesh with our own get-ups, or the year before, when he forced his wailing, month-and-a-half-old blob of a body into a lion costume.

My wife, however, has much more than a mere awareness of Halloween, she has an obsession with it. On one hand, this is a good thing, because now that she has a living doll to dress up, I get a bit of a reprieve from the costume game. On the other hand, when there’s a Draculacane or BooBerryizzard or whatever they were calling the storm of the millennium, and it threatens to shut down the spooky festivities, my wife is not one to take that lightly.

After all, we didn’t drive halfway across the state to find the one store that still had our son’s costume in stock to not go trick or treating! So while Halloween was postponed in our town, we found a nearby hamlet that was still allowing children to wander the dark streets in packs, side-stepping broken trees and fallen power lines to demand chocolate-covered diabetes-kickstarters from strange, mask-wearing people with ghosts and skeletons and mutilated pumpkins on their lawns. What a holiday!

But we made the trek. And he got to dress in some “<a href="“Yo Gabba Gabba” gear and gather some candy, most of which I’ve already eaten, except or the repellent Milk Duds, which Mom and Buried somehow enjoys. The kid had fun, didn’t struggle to get out of his costume even once, and once he realized he couldn’t actually go inside people’s houses, he was more than content to accept from them a bunch of things we will never allow him to eat.

Yeah, Halloween was a bit scarier than usual this year, thanks to Hurricane Sandy (for more details of our harrowing, power-free experiences, check my Twitter feed: @dadandburied), but thanks to my wife, we powered through and gave my son a proper trick or treating experience. We avoided getting electrocuted, and so far I haven’t chomped on a single piece of hidden glass!

I hope you and your family are surviving as well, especially those of you on the East Coast that were hammered by a storm that, for once, lived up to the hype. I think I prefer it when the news goes overboard and nothing actually happens.

Here’s a picture of the little DJ himself to lift your spirits:

Happy Halloween!