you want a halloween post? YOU CAN'T HANDLE A HALLOWEEN POST!

i am sure the suspense is absolutely murdering you. "what," you are asking, "did mr nice guy do for hallowe'en?!" well, i'll tell you: i blew my nose. and also, a little bit, i coughed. you may have noticed a lack of activity around here lately. that's because some rapidly mutating bug located a hitherto unknown chink in my impervious antibacterial armor and infected me, and my entire family, down to the bone. we have SARS. we're in the grip of the grippe. got a touch of ague. we're dying. all of us.

it started last wednesday when mrs nice guy came home feverish. she was nauseous. she was so, so cold. after feeding the child, she promptly went to bed. then vomited. i don't know what you're thinking, but i can tell you what we were thinking: oh sweet merciful innocent kind and good tiny baby jesus who died for our horrible wicked ways, PLEASE don't let mrs nice guy be pregnant again. she took a test. she's not. she went to sleep for two days and woke up well. and all was right in the world.

oh but then. then! it seems mrs nice guy got off lucky. a day of discomfort and a day of rest. well. on thursday mr nice guy woke up with a lump of sandpaper and burning coal in his throat. then the old nose started to run like prefontaine (which, now that i think of it, would be a fantastic hallowe'en costume). oof. then he made the incredibly unwise decision of going to an open bluegrass jam session until 1:30 in the am (he left after he ran into his neighbor who had apparently just split from her husband and is now vigorously shtumping a much younger man). by the time the weekend got under way i was ready to admit defeat and donate my remains to the nearest center for rare infectious disease. little did i know how GOOD i had it.

dearhearts, my kid contracted her first cold. and i am the evil bastard who gave it to her. she sounds like someone pumped her tiny skull full of jello. she doesn't actually seem to mind being sick so much, she's just uncomfortable. oh yeah, and not sleeping. the other night she woke up every hour on the hour because she can't breathe through her nose and doesn't generally breathe through her mouth. so she pretty much sounds like this all the time: SSNXXXXXXXXX. and then she coughs. and then she gets pissed and then she cries. it's heartbreaking to watch. i wish i could have every cold she's ever going to have. (ok, maybe not really. but i would gladly have every cold she's going to have until she turns three. then she can have them herself.)

still. we're troopers, all of us. the full brunt of the plague had not yet totally hit us on saturday, so we went to a hallowe'en party. you know, for kids. this of course required dressing the baby up (i dress like a buffoon every other day of the year, so i see no point in hallowe'en ... other than to witness the annual baffling phenomenon of otherwise respectable young ladies using the holiday as an excuse to dress like sluts).

mrs nice guy, as i mentioned earlier, strictly forbade the baby hooker costume -- my logic, i thought, was infallible: if the point of hallowe'en is for otherwise respectable young ladies to dress like sluts, why not get the kid started early? convinced anything was better than an off-the-rack fuzzy li'l punkin suit, i managed to talk her into a compromise: BABY ELVIS. brilliant, right? yeah, i thought so too.

until i had to begin designing a baby elvis costume. (i am of course talking about the only elvis that matters costume-wise: bloated-on-the-toilet elvis.) have you ever tried to pull together a baby elvis costume? harder than it sounds. the closest i could get: a black onesie with flames shooting down the arms. pretty bitchin', actually. so i bought it. but then it was cold out, so i put her in overalls. not very elvis. then mrs nice guy forbade me from painting sideburns on the baby's face with mascara. not very elvis at all. so i hit upon a solution: put some blue suede canvas shoes on her and call her carl perkins! then i bought a prop -- the world's smallest guitar -- and tied a bandana around her neck. not very carl perkins. she looked more like woody guthrie, so that's who she was.

her guitar may have cowboys on it, as opposed to the famously scrawled THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS, but i have to admit she made a damn fine woody guthrie. but don't take my word for it. here's the original, lost in a sullen revolutionary reverie:

and here's the facsimile, sullenly wondering why she can't breathe through her nose anymore (you can juuust barely make out the bitchin' flames on her sleeve):

she totally had the best costume at the party. we have sunken to bottomless depths of illness since this picture was taken and did absolutely nothing for the actual day of hallowe'en (oh, i did have to lug her into manhattan to get her nose treated again, which was a delight). and going to connecticut on sunday was probably a big mistake. but i did manage to get her admirably suited up for her first All Hallow's Eve. i just sincerely hope she didn't get any of the other babies sick ... that would be very un-guthrie of her.