Aargh! It's Costume Time Again

I should have known better and in truth, I did. That little voice of reason – call it mother’s intuition or simple common sense – was telling me to leave the Halloween costume on the shelf, that it was still too early to commit.
Alas, did I heed that intuitive wisdom? Of course not and now here we are, right back to where we were two years ago.
That year it was the daisy. After a fairly intense Internet and in-store browsing search, I finally found it: the perfect Halloween costume for my then 22-month-old daughter. It met all my ‘new mother’ standards – it was one piece with a single zipper (easy on, easy off), it had a hood (she’d be warm for her first real trick-or-treating excursion), nothing over the face (she’d be able to see where she was going and wouldn’t suffocate) and it was roomy enough that I’d be able to put a sweat suit on underneath it without turning her into a stuffed sausage like Randy from “A Christmas Story.” Aside from all the practical stuff, it was precious too. The hood had big white petals and there were little red ladybugs embroidered along the body.
Her reaction to it was less than enthusiastic: she absolutely hated it. A little desperate, I tried (gently) forcing her into it but ultimately I conceded. The mission was futile and I threw the daisy costume in the bottom of my closet.
The day before Halloween that same year while looking for a simple orange sweatshirt or a Halloween-themed top of sorts (good luck finding one of those in a 2T the day before Halloween) I happened across a pumpkin costume. It was nothing fancy: a puffy orange body suit with a happy pumpkin face and an orange hat with a green stem. It was her size – just about the only thing in her size – and it was about seven bucks: sold. Of course that was the costume she didn’t want to take off. She traipsed around the yard in it that afternoon and happily strolled through the neighborhood in it the following night.
Now three years old and even more opinionated, I started asking in mid-to-late September what she wanted to be for Halloween this year. Every time I asked her response was the same: Ariel (a.k.a. the Little Mermaid for those of you who watch movies with real people instead of animated characters). So when we were in the store and she spotted that Ariel Halloween costume, I foolishly ignored that inner voice (remember that little voice?) and Ariel came home with us.
She liked it for about a day, just long enough to take it out of the bag and remove all the tags. Now it’s in the bottom of my closet next to the daisy costume and she wants to be Sleeping Beauty.
You can just imagine what that “inner-voice” is saying to me now. Halloween is three weeks away; I think we’ll wait at least two-and-a-half weeks before we start looking again.