Deck the Halls.... FAIL!!!

I'm feeling very happy and proud because the whole family pitched in on Sunday and decorated the tree and put up most of the Christmas decorations.

We even managed to do this with only 2 reprimands and one "If you bug her again you will NOT be getting back on that computer today!" .... All the while I'm thinking to myself, 'You are going to sit here and join in with the family and you are GOING to enjoy it OR ELSE!' Luckily I realized that actually voicing that sentiment might be counter productive... but I was thinking it.

So these are now some of the sights in our house...

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why the post title?" Well, because we had a huge snowfall last night that covered everything.. well almost everything. It did however highlight some things that I'd kind of missed before.

As I pulled into the driveway this morning after running the carpool I noticed six of these little babies popping out of the snow in the front flower bed.

Happy Halloween!

Well the day came and went... and I got the costumes finished. Just barely.

Sammi's actually didn't require much, she found a costume to buy. We just had to spray her hair orange and curl it, then Riley did her fabulous Mad Hatter make-up. I only got a couple pictures of Sammi because it was kind of a hectic day and she spent most of it at her friend's house. So she missed a lot of the picture taking. Which if you know Sammi... is fine by her. She's usually avoiding the cameras.
I only got a couple of shots before she started pulling the "that's enough mom" face.
For Olivia we pulled out the old Lara Croft cosutme. It only needed a few tweaks. AND... she has enough hair that we didn't need to use extensions! She had a great time posing and doing action poses on the trampoline. Most of those action poses ended up with her tongue poked in her cheek.
Cute little stinker.

Riley was Alice from Resident Evil. If you don't know who that is... she basically kills zombies that are infected with the T-virus that was engineered by the evil Umbrella Corporation. Duh!
Her vest and holsters were a lot of work, but it was kind of fun to see if I could do it. We even temp dyed her hair for the occasion.

For my sake you've got to click the picture below so you can see a close-up of all the work I did on something that only got worn twice! I'm thinking Zombie killing might be a recurring costume around here just so I can feel like all the work was worth it.
Matt modified the 2 nerf shotguns for her. He had to saw off the stocks and the barrels. He also found a way to make them shoot farther on a youtube video. Then he had to paint the shotguns and pistols.

In a previous post I included a picture of the real Alice. So I couldn't help trying to re-create the movie poster with Riley in it. Not too bad if I don't say so myself. I think we got the costume pretty darn close!