Costumes and Costume Changes :)

When we initially asked James what he wanted to be for Halloween, he would go back and forth between a Venus Flytrap and Frank the Combine Harvester from Cars. I know those sound like unique choices, but that quality is one of the things that I love most about James! We knew that we would clearly have to make either of those choices (which we were okay with since we had always pulled things together to make his costumes every other year up to this point anyway), but when we learned our church's event would have inflatables we encouraged him to pick something that he would be able to move around in a little easier. He decided on a shark which was another good choice, because he loves sea animals. We found a good price and decided it would probably be more economical just to buy his costume this year.

Since Jude is so little this year and would mostly be spending his time in the baby carrier, we decided to let him wear the giraffe outfit that James wore his first Halloween. (James has said for a while that giraffes are his favorite animal, so I thought it would be fun for him as well.) I was able to get a few, sweet pictures of them out in our yard before an event at the library that our neighbor (who is a librarian at a different library) invited us to.

He just kills me with all that cuteness.

You can see James dressed in the same outfit in October of 2010 here.

One adorable little shark!
(Sometimes he says he's  just a regular shark and sometimes he says that he's Bruce from Finding Nemo.)

And then last week, we decided to take the boys to Boo at the Zoo on Stephen's off day. None of us had ever been before. It turned out that there was only one day that the zoo was having the event on a night when Stephen was off (since our "weekends" are Tuesday and Wednesday), so we decided to take advantage of it. James decided right before we went that he couldn't be a shark since our zoo does not have sharks. (He can be so stubborn, but he always has a logical reason behind it!) We decided that it wasn't a battle worth fighting, and we let him wear grey clothing, his Alabama jersey, and his Big Al hat. He told everyone that he wasn't "Big Al but just a regular elephant." I thought he looked very cute, but we kindly told him that he would have to wear the shark costume outfit from here on out! Ha! And since James had a costume change, we decided to dress Jude in a white sleeper and polar bear hat that we already had as well. I felt it was appropriate since we call him our "Jude-y Bear" and our "baby bear." :) And I snapped a few more pictures in our yard...

"Baby Bear sighs under Mama's soft touch. And Mama Bear tells him, 'I love you so much!"
(All the Ways I Love You by Julie Downing)

And this little stinker got a ridiculous amount of "extra candy" at almost every table that night, because everyone was so excited about his Alabama attire. They all asked him to say "Roll Tide!" I guess his persistence paid off... :)