Book Week should be Banned***

It is the annual book week parade tomorrow*. The boys' school, like many others, will host a dress up parade. Different schools have various tangents on the same theme, but for the boys, they have to dress up as their favourite character from a book. Turns out this isn't easy if you are a 9 year old boy.

Apparently none of the characters from his favourite books from recent months (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) is 'cool' enough.

He loves Pokemon, and there are books (we even have some); but his mother's sewing skills are just not up to creating that sort of costume, and the chance that he might end up looking like a really cute stuffed toy is just too great a risk to take.

For a while he toyed with the idea of a Zombie or a Smurf, but decided against them.

More recently he has been really into Deltora Quest. He finally decided that the only character he wanted to be was a 'Dread Gnome' from Deltora Quest. I asked him if he could describe it to me. He couldn't. I asked him to draw me a picture, but he said he didn't know what they looked like. Made it sort of difficult. Even my googling research didn't do me much good.

While searching through op-shops for things that might work for a Dread Gnome, he finally decided to give up on that idea, and go as a vampire. By this stage, I really couldn't have cared less if he had ever read a vampire book in his life. 'Great!' I said, and we went and bought a cape and some vampire teeth.

Last night while I was writing this he said 'mum, do you know where my vampire teeth are?'. Hours of searching later, they were still missing in action. Not such a great vampire costume without teeth. I tried to explain the concept of 'making lemonade from lemons', and he decided that he would go as a different character from Deltora Quest, and all we would need to do in addition to the black cape was a bit of facepaint. Phew! 

And then, there are always the last minute debates over whether you are meant to wear your uniform under your costume, or take it, or not...  Can't wait for next year!

Playing along with diary of a SAMH and her IBOT

* I started writing this yesterday, but life** got in the way.
** well, mainly just lost vampire teeth really.
***At least for 9-year old boys. 6 year old boy's costume was easy- he went has Harry Potter :)