A gender confused lion and a cheerleader

This week was Halloween! Last Sunday, we tried to do a little photo shoot with all the grandkids in their costumes. Since Ryan's family has seen Ari in her cheer outfit a few times, I decided to do the lion costume. I figured I'd put a flower in the mane to make it look like a girl lion. As I was putting the flower in the mane, Ryan pointed out to me that only BOY lions have manes. (note: he SWEARS he told me this when I first brought the costume home, but I have no recollection of that conversation.) I knew that.... it just hadn't crossed my mind- but we were doing the pictures that night, so we decided to just go with it and say she was a gender confused lion. It went full circle, really. She was a girl dressed as a boy dressed as a girl. Totally works. Anyway- turns out that trying to get 3 1-1 1/2 year old kids to sit still for a pictures is basically impossible. They all wanted to go play in Grandma and Grandpa's room, so we compromised by trying to take a picture of everybody on the bed. This is how we started:

And 2 seconds later looked like this:

Total fail.

 Here is Ari riding on the exercise machine. This was good because her hands were occupied and she couldn't pull the hood of her costume off. :)

Then all the kids wanted to take turns having Grandma bounce them on the yoga ball. Katie and Braedon had their good camera with them, and I am sure got a lot better shots than I did. I know they have a couple of cute ones of Ari and Rose together. You'll have to keep an eye out for them on her blog. 

On Monday night, we carved pumpkins. I tried to have Ari help clean out her pumpkin, but it grossed her out. She only tried it once I'd already done all the dirty work. She then tried to eat the pumpkin guts- that didn't go over so well, either. She was pretty excited about them when we were all finished and lit them up on the porch, at least. 

 Ari's is the little smiley face, mine is the cat, and Ryan's is the haunted house scene. 

Not gonna lie- I'm pretty impressed with our mad pumpkin carving skills.

For the actual day of Halloween, we decided to go with the cheerleader costume. To try and jazz it up a bit, I got some pom poms and a face sticker. She was much more comfortable in this, and was able to stay in her costume all day, which was nice. I got the day off, so we were able to go see GG (my grandma) for a few minutes. We had plans to go see a bunch of other people, but Ari's nap schedule has been a little wonky lately, and she wasn't being very cooperative, so we weren't able to do much during the day. I took her trick or treating to about 10 houses or so. I could never get her to say, "trick or treat." You got either a "trick" or a "treat," but not both.  At first, she thought she was supposed to go inside. Then she just wanted to pet everyone's dogs- didn't pay attention to the candy at all. The last couple of houses we went to, I told them not to bother with the candy, and to just let her pet their dog for a second. It's kind of embarrassing going when it's obvious that I'm the one who's going to be eating all the candy. At a couple of houses, they even asked me what I'd like. :) Not that I'm going to complain about getting candy..... Once we got home and dumped out Ari's candy, THEN she was interested and spent the next half hour demanding "MORE!"

 Look at that face!! It's no wonder this girl gets pretty much whatever she wants!

 "TOUCHDOWN!"

 She was diggin' the pom poms. 

 With her spread after trick or treating. This is her "this is friggin' awesome!" face. 

Showing off her blue tongue after eating some Sixlets. Check out how long that thing is!! Next year we should dress her up like Gene Simmons from KISS!