Book Week '10

This morning on our way to school we passed  a car... riding a bike, Robin Hood, a handful of Disney Princesses, a witch, a doctor, a policeman, a bunch of Angelina Ballerinas, half a dozen or more Tinkerbells, Captain Hook and other assorted pirates and one Peter Pan.  There can only be one explanation for this...

It's book week this week.  Schools are celebrating reading, encouraging kids in literacy and getting them to dress up as their favourite book character.

Lion's class had been 'studying' the fantastic book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and Lion asked that I make a caterpillar costume for him... "and you could maybe make it turn into a butterfly"... yeah, Lion, and maybe I couldn't too...  It turned out that they had to actually own the book and bring it with them and since we don't actually own that book he had to pick something else.  After much discussion he made his decision.

Recently I picked up a few books for the kids in a seconds store for one of our big book retailers.  One that I picked up was titled "Why are Lions Lazy?" (details and photo source here)  it's a question and answer book about the big cats.  We have many story books that include Lions of all descriptions but this is the book that Lion wanted to take as his inspiration for his Lion costume.  So, late last night I put together a Lion costume for him... you'd think with over a weeks notice I would have done something before the last minute but no.  It was fairly simple, orange shorts, orange shirt, tail and mane... MANE??? probably should have considered that bit of it before hand...

In the end I figured it out and I used an old orange terry square nappy and cut the binding off the edges (thankfully I saved it because that ended up being plaited for the tail), cut the bare edges to be all ratty and cut a hole in the middle big enough to pull over his head and then pull back towards the front so it sat hanging over his face in a mane-like fashion... or something like that.

He was happy with it which was the most important thing.  One grandmother that does the school runs for her daughter said that she was buying all their costumes because once you get all the bits and pieces you need and spend hours putting it together it's better to just spend the $20 on buying a costume.  Now, I know I wont be getting out of it this easy every year but there was no way I was going to start off with offering to buy him a costume.  I'm glad I didn't because this one was free.  Everything we had at home ready to be used.

Dragon wanted to be in on the action too so I dressed him in all orange today and drew a nose and whiskers on him too and he got in on the photos...

ROAR.

They do a parade thing at some point during the day but that wasn't really advertised so I couldn't get along to it but Lion did get an award for "Best Animal Costume"... YAY!

He was very proud of his award and I tried to not let it go to my head.  Because realistically, read that list of costumes we saw, back at the top....

Yeah, I have a feeling he might have been the ONLY animal costume.

So the moral of the story... Don't go as Tinkerbell.