Today’s edition of Meet Us Monday is special for two reasons: 1. It’s obviously a Tuesday. Can we just pretend I got this done on Monday?? and 2. We’re letting you in on one of our family’s FAVORITE traditions – family Halloween costumes! Dress up is kind of a big deal at our house on a normal day (ALL the princess things!), but it’s even bigger when Halloween comes around and we have costumes for everyone!

   We started this tradition when Adelyn was just a baby. We were helping out with a Trunk or Treat and our good friends forced us into dressing up with them. To be honest, I thought it was ridiculous at first, but we decided to jump right in and go for it! What started as a way to appease our friends has quickly turned into our favorite family tradition!

   So, in the spirit of really getting to know us, I thought we’d catch y’all up on the past five years of costumes (and I’ll apologize in advance for the less than great iPhone photos throughout)! First up, the nerds! You’d still be our friends if we dressed like this all the time, right??

The following year, I was pregnant with Elsie and had to try to figure out a costume that would work with a pregnant belly! My solution: make a costume where I could cut a hole out of the center! Here, we have our little bee (who still doesn’t seem like she wants to be included in her parents’ wild schemes!), the bee hive, and our brave pest control man!

Two years ago, we asked Adelyn what she wanted to be for Halloween and our Disney princess-loving girl said she wanted to be a PIRATE! Her answer was the same a few days later, so we went with it. I mean, look at that HAPPY little pirate! And I may be biased, but Elsie is the PRETTIEST parrot I’ve ever seen! I still die every time I see these pictures of her!

Last year, we had my sister, Brie, and her boyfriend, Dakota, (affectionately known as Aunt B and Kota around here) joined us! Addy wanted to be a rainbow, so we built an entire weather crew: DeBrie of the storm, Lightning, your local weather man, Hurricane Elsie (a very apt costume!), Sun, and of course, the Rainbow!

And finally, this year! When we asked our girls what they wanted to be for Halloween, they both said “MERMAIDS”! One late-night look on Pinterest revealed this awesome DIY jelly fish costume for me! After tossing around a few ideas of what Smitty could be (how exactly would you make a Sebastian costume??), we settled on a scuba diver and then we were set! Also, you can’t see it in these images, but my jellyfish hat lit up, which was pretty dang cool, if I do say so myself!

Here’s a bonus: If you look closely at a few pictures, you can see another one of our family’s Halloween traditions: painting pumpkins! The girls love getting to paint their own pumpkins however they want and they love showing them off to anyone and EVERYONE who comes to our house!

What are your family traditions? Did you dress up for Halloween? Let us see those costumes!!