After many years of attending Matthew and Allison’s school programs and trying to see over a bunch of tall heads with little success it was finally Emilee’s turn to have her first school musical. I think she was just as excited that it was Matthew and Allison’s turn to try and see over peoples heads to watch her. Luckily Emilee is one of the tallest, if not the tallest kindergartner so she was up on the top row of the risers and we could see her pretty well most of the time. It was pretty cute. They did songs with a forest/jungle theme and dressed up as different animals. Emilee was assigned to dress up as a porcupine. She strongly declined having a solo speaking part. She did however agree to do the Jungle Hop dance with a small group of other kids. She did a great job.
As excited as we were to see her performance, I was not to thrilled about trying to come up with a porcupine costume. I walk the line between balancing the right amount of time,energy and money for a cute costume that will be worn one time for 20 minutes. It seems like I am often on the ‘most obscure’ costumes list too. Some of the trickier ones we have had to come up with is a worm (we had this one twice, very tricky to not look like a piece of poop or a male body part), Humpty Dumpty (with enough pizzazz and sparkle that Allison would wear it) a snowflake, an Indian, a nerd and a zookeeper (not to be confused with a garbage man).
Each kid is a little different in what they are willing or want to wear too. Matthew usually doesn’t care what I hand him to wear so he is pretty easy. Allison is the trickiest. As soon as she is assigned to dress up as something she immediately rants about how dumb it is and says she refuses to do it. If she sees or hears anything that might indicate you are making a costume it starts the rant all over. Then the day before the performance after everyone at school has been talking about their costumes and building up the excitement she will come to me with a complete over the top idea of how she will dress up as the assigned whatever and expect me to pull it of thin air immediately. This caused complete meltdowns, hair pulling frustration and crying on both our parts the first few years. I really started loathing school programs. However, by the time second grade came around I had figured out a pretty good way to appease my, plan ahead and keep it simple style, and Allison’s flare for drama and statement making style. I digress, Emilee is a mix of the two. I can make whatever I want for her to wear but unlike Allison she does not want to stand out and if she feels like she does she will have nothing to do with it. Case in point. If you ask Emilee if she raised her hand at school she will look and you with a mortified look on her face and say, “No! If you raise your hand people look at you!” So, when I saw she was supposed to be a porcupine I was a little stumped on what would work for her. Pinterest was no help with low key simple costumes. Eventually I came across a porcupine wall decal that would fit perfectly on the front of her shirt. Then we put a pony tail in her hair and made it ‘spiky’. Taadaa! Both of us were happy campers. In fact, I personally thought only one other person had a better costume (according to my criteria of time,effort,money vs 20 minute usage.) One of Emilee’s besties Laney was a peacock. She had a peacock feather in her headband and a shirt that said ‘Pretend I am a Peacock’. How perfect is that! I told her mom I was doing that for whatever Emilee ended up being next year.