Poof the magic dragon

Shall we talk about crafting with your kid? It always seems as though doing things like this should be lots of fun but they aren’t; they always turn out to be an exercise in frustration. Does it get better as the kids get older?

Remember that Sam wants to be a dragon for Halloween? He specified that he wants to be a purple dragon. Of course, I aim to please.

The project started well with us touring the basement looking for cardboard of an appropriate size and given that Ben orders everything by mail, we were able to find exactly what we needed. Cutting out the pieces was a joy since Sam wanted to nab the blade each time I set it down. A visit to the emergency room wasn’t part of the project plan. The living room was covered in little pieces of cardboard by the time I was done and Sam assisted entropy as much as he could.

With the cutting and taping complete, we moved to the painting step. Spray paint sounds fast and thrilling to Sam. “I want to do it!” was heard from one end of the yard to the next. Alas, even with gloves it wasn’t feasible as I’d prefer to avoid finding out what to do about purple eyeballs.

Finally, a step for Sam – head decorating. Nothing like a silver Sharpie and instructions to use it only on the head to make sure he tried it on the table. FYI – it came off with Fantastic. We added a little glitter glue since all dragons should be sparkly, shouldn’t they?

The head has been living on top of the television so we can bask in the glory of a big purple dragon head any time we so desire.

This morning we assembled the costume in preparation for a birthday/Halloween party today. The final product gets two thumbs up! I’m guessing it won’t survive a full party AND trick or treating but at least I’ve got pictures to show that it once existed as a single entity. And he wore it for a whole two seconds!

The best thing? It’s NOT Barney!

I noticed when I looked at the pictures that one of the eyes rotated 90 degrees. I'm inclined it leave it that way so the Dragon looks a little crazy, sort of like me for starting this project.