4 posts tagged “parenting”

It's St. Patrick's Day and when I picked Mathilda up from preschool today she was talking about how the "Leopard-Caun" came today. He's green and "leopard-ish" and left some gold outside her school in the playground area. Two of her school-mates claim to have seen it...hmmm...makes me wonder about those two. Are they in on the scam or just scammers? Anyway, I thought "leapord-caun" was adorable so I had to make note of it somewhere.

She said that her teachers had told the kids that if they didn't take their naps that the leopard-caun was going to tell the Easter Bunny not to come. Pretty weak. It sounds like something I might say in one of my weaker moments.

Disclaimer: Halloween was over 4 months ago and these photos are not even from last year's Halloween because last year Mathilda refused to wear any of the cute costumes we had at our disposal.  She nixed this adorable home-made costume, a princess dress, a Mexican dress, a Moroccan outfit and finally settled on wearing her flight jacket (a Nick purchase that I think I mentioned previously) with her pink Elmer Fudd style hat and we called her a "baby pilot." Unfortunately we forgot the wooden airplane which would have completed the outfit (sort of) but luckily no one refused her candy in spite of her weak Halloween costume. The stakes are high in this city when it comes to dressing up, as you can imagine with our enthusiastic gay population.

To the photos at hand, this costume was a big hit and fairly easy to make. I bought the black hooded jacket (though Mathilda was refusing to wear hats or hoods at the time so that part is not so important though you could glue cute eyeballs on it if you had a different kid), a couple pairs of black tights and black gloves, black pants and a black turtleneck. The pants and turtleneck aren't important but add to the blackness of the outfit. Anyway, cut the legs and feet off the tights and sew the gloves to one end of the tights. Stuff with something not too heavy but that will fill the tights and gloves out. I used newspaper. Sew other end of tights to the sides of the jacket or sweater of whatever you're using.  Then the clever part is attaching the extra arms to the actual arm of the jacket. You have to leave a lot of slack between the arms. If you do this right (see attached photo for crappy but successful implementation) when the child raises his/her arms, the other arms also rise. We got a few "That's the best costume I've seen all night," when we were out trick-or-treating, which of course made me feel triumphant. Particularly because Nick had had a different strategy altogether on how to do this (involving hanger wires in the arms, etc.) which I vetoed.

Ahhh victory!

Nick escorted Mathilda to her preschool's Valentine's Day Party which was a Teddy Bear Tea Party. Mathilda selected her tiniest bear that was given to her at Burning Man by my mother-in-law's new best friend.

It's a cute little bear and conveniently fits into her lunchbox. You can see this little bear in the top photo where she is proudly displaying it on her head and in the lower photo where she's dancing with it. I don't think this bear has a name but if you asked Mathilda she might say its name was either "Blue" or "Flaki" her two favorite names for dolls and stuffed animals.

I'm grateful to Nick for humoring me and taking Mathilda to the party. Wednesday is her "daddy day" and she doesn't go to school. They usually go to swimming class and then do whatever they do the rest of the day. Most likely horsing around, lollygagging and goofing off. From the photos it looks like it was a sweet little party and I'm glad Nick let me pressure him into taking Mathilda. At one point he said, "Why don't you take her," to which I replied, "I've got a job."

Therein lies one of my biggest internal struggles right now - working vs. spending time w/ Mathilda. I could have taken the day off but I had worked from home a couple Wednesdays in January since Nick had trade shows to go to and there is a lot of flux at work right now. Specifically the issue of my working remotely seems to be in question to some degree. The new guy running the company is a bit old school and the owner is definitely traditional in that one sense...he likes to see live bodies working in the office. Hmph.

Oh and that's Mathilda's best school friend with her in the middle picture. She loves Lucas who is sadly moving away. Poor Tida. She'll be bummed. I'm sure she'll recruit another boy to be her best friend.