Day of the Living Zoë

I'd say this picture pretty much sums up Zoë's Sunday. Today Zoë participated in her first zombie walk, an annual charity event where hundreds of people dress up like the living dead and shamble through various metropolitan areas.

Our route this year took us through Oakland Cemetery (where another organization was having a fall festival, completely oblivious to the hordes of undead that would soon lay waste to their celebrations), around a few blocks of Atlanta and culminating with a mass rampage through Atlanta Underground, a local shopping center. All said and done about 500 people showed up to take part.

Unfortunately, Zoë was not able to be made up. She's simply too young to put the various pastes and gels on her face, so she had to settle for a hand we made for her, complete with meat and viscera hanging out the back.

We spent the better part of two days getting our costumes ready. In fact, Zoë went down for her morning nap just before we started the main portion of our makeup. When it was time to get her up we went into her room in full zombie regalia. She woke up, did a double take and started quivering that lower lip, teetering on the brink of a full blown meltdown. I quickly called out "Hey, Zozo" in one of my high-pitched daddy voices and then she just started laughing.

She was absolutely the talk of the town at the event today. We decked her out in a little skeleton onesie and gave her that hand. People stopped to take pictures of her constantly. We pushed her in the stroller for the entire two to three mile duration of the walk.

The walk itself was crazy. They didn't close down the streets for traffic, so hordes of zombies would go running at cars that were stopped. It was all in good fun and nobody was actually threatened.

The highlight for myself was watching a fully grown man squeal like a girl and RUN about 15 feet from us. He had stopped to look at a zombie in front of us who happened to have creepy contact lenses in. He squealed and started back towards us so Jen started moving towards him. The man was in an absolute panic. Of course once he realized what was going on he had quite a laugh.

After the walk ended and the zombies dispersed, we stuck around to get some dinner. I left Jen and Zoë with our friends and made my way over to Dairy Queen to get a burger. There was a lady in front of me in line with a young daughter. The daughter tugged on mother's sleeve and said, "Mommy, there's a zombie behind you". The mother turned expecting to see nothing, saw me, let out a very loud "OH JESUS!" and ran a few feet away.

Zoë had an absolute blast. People were giving her attention all day long and she never once got fussy or irritable.

I'll put a few pics up here for now. There will be more coming once I get the pictures from Aunt Lara. Enjoy. As always, you can click on the picture to see a larger copy in a new tab.