Better late than never...
For Halloween this year, we thought we'd go "easy", especially since Tenille was pregnant... she expressed that she didn't have the energy to go all out this year...  Despite her wishes, I managed to coax my poor wife into doing the 3 bears this year...   I convinced her that since I already have a brown suit from being a moose last year, I just need a bear hood... We were able to find a bear outfit for our boy Caleb, and so that just left finding or making a bear suit for Tenille...  This was clearly the "easiest" thing we could do for Halloween.  Just as most fiascoes begin, Tenille's first mistake was to let me go shopping for her costume by myself... Tenille had an evening appointment which left me and Caleb to our own devices... We eventually made our way to Joann's fabric... and I proceeded to pick out the most difficult fabric to work with... but to my credit - it looked really close to real bear fur...
When I got home and explained to my wife what I had done, she gave a big sigh and gave me the eye.  The eye that says, "What have you done?  Why have you involved me in this?"  Sadly, I'm very familiar with this eye and I quickly assured her that I would cut all the material... and she just had to sew it together... With that, we spent a perfectly good evening cutting and sewing in the wee hours of the night.  The worst part was that the bear fur exploded when you cut the fabric.  Our entire family room was covered in fur like material.  It stuck to everything like little alien creatures invading our home - to our clothes, carpet, the wall, etc.  It took nearly an hour to clean up the mess afterwards.  (It actually took longer, but after about an hour, we were both tired of cleaning up and gave up for the evening.)
I have to admit that I have an affinity to full body costumes.  It's a symbol that we take this Holiday seriously.   We're not just a "mask" family.  We put on suits.... Halloween day whizzed passed us.  I think our costumes made sense when we were together as a family, and a lot of people quickly recognized us as the "three bears".  But unfortunately, we hardly spent more than 1/2 hour within proximity of each other because of our various duties that evening.  When you're part of the "Three bears" you're cute... but when you're just a guy wearing a bear costume, you're a freak.  Oh well... no use hiding the obvious...
We did manage to get collect ourselves as a family and snap off a few pics.  Next year, the work to pay-off ratio needs to be much lower... I suppose we could add our new baby son as Goldilocks, and be done with it... but there is the church cross-dressing policy... (I have a feeling, I won't be in charge of costumes next year...)