So the big kids have been thinking a lot about costumes this week, and about the AWANA carnival coming up next week. Actually they've been thinking about it a lot for the past two months.
D1 has remained unvarying in her choice: a princess. However, she's been designing her own costume, including making a headdress loosely inspired by Griselda in The Court Jester which consists of a piece of purple gingham in an embroidery hoop, with purple butterfly charms sewn onto it. (Yes, she did them herself, with some help threading the needle.) I'm not sure what will wind up being on the rest of her, but you can be sure of one thing: She will not look like she got a Disney Princess costume off the rack.
D2 initially varied between being a robot and being a knight. No problem, I said, and made sure his fall wardrobe included a pair of gray sweatpants and a gray thermal shirt. Robot or knight, we're covered with the base, and he already had the knight accouterments, whereas a robot merely required a cardboard box spray-painted silver.
But "indecision" is D2's middle name. As the time drew near, he started thinking about other things. I got worried. DOB suggested a dog or a wolf. "It's OK," I said, "Dogs are gray. Wolves are gray. All it takes is a pair of ears. I can do that." Other ideas came up. D1 made a long list of possibilities (and an equally long list for herself, all variations on Girls Wearing Fancy Dresses), then asked me to correct the spelling and recopied it twice. Most of them could be done in some variation of gray, if not just regular clothes.
Unfortunately, what he finally seems to have settled on is Dragon, after some concern over whether it would violate the carnival's ban on scary costumes. (I pointed out that some dragons are non-scary, like the one in The Reluctant Dragon.) And what kind of boring dragon is gray?
I did dig up an old but not impossibly small bright yellow hoodie that I can sew felt spikes and a tail on. But I'm still kind of hoping he'll switch back to knight before I do it.
And I have an uneasy feeling that whatever I sew, he'll wish at the last minute he'd picked something else.
2 comments:
awesome dragons are grey, that's which. it's cause it goes so well with the ashes left over when they burn things.
I so understand the anxiety of listening to your son decide what he's going to be for Halloween. Stuart starts the discussion sometime in July every year, and confidently assumes that I can create the most random computer-game characters. This year he's a Blue Myconid from IceWind Dale. A myconid (I learned) is a mushroom creature. It has to be blue. Isn't that a great idea, Mama?
So here's hoping that D2 is happy to be gray, whatever he decides on. Maybe you can attach red felt spikes to his gray sweatsuit, give him red gloves, and convince him that dragons are usually red and gray?
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