There are some things in life which I swear are created solely to make mothers feel inadequate and useless, and World Book Day falls squarely into that category in my opinion. Along with spots and stripes day for Children in Need. Pyjama days – now THOSE I can cope with it, although we should perhaps gloss over the fact that I managed to send the kids to school in their school uniform for that as well last term, because I was a week out in my planning. Still, could have been worse, I could have been a week out in the other direction, right?
So World Book Day has been a complete disaster. My eldest point blank refused to contemplate dressing up because it was ‘stupid’. In vain I tried to come up with people for him to dress up as – the Demon Dentist? Wimpy Kid? Horrid Henry? Charlie from the Chocolate Factory? No – none of these fitted the bill. Then finally – ever the creature of habit – at bedtime yesterday he said ‘fine, I’ll go as James and the Giant Peach again’ – except I foolishly didn’t keep last year’s Giant Peach and we had nothing big enough to magic one up.
‘Right’ says he.’This is my LAST WORD on the subject – I’ll be Timmy.’
‘Timmy…which Timmy?’
‘Timmy from the Famous Five, of course!’
Well, if I can’t magic up a giant peach at 8pm at night, I sure as hell can’t magic up a flipping doggy costume…after much more discussion we finally settled upon Dennis the Menace – I am not sure if comic characters count for World Book Day but frankly I’ll take what I can get on this one, so Dennis the Menace it was. Except this morning he said he was too cold to wear shorts – can’t blame him, really. So he basically went to school in his school uniform with a red and black top that he grew out of 2 years ago. World Book Day Epic Fail Number One.
My daughter views World Book Day completely differently – she practically inhales any book she can get her hands on. The whole process of choosing a costume was much more fun, and over the week we’ve we discussed the relative merits of Amelia Jane, A Little Princess, Anne from the Famous Five, any of the Colour Fairies or Rainbow Fairies, as well as what I’d call traditional Fairy Tale characters but what she calls Disney Princesses…we’d finally settled on the Worst Witch. Yay! A fun costume that she was excited about, that I could manage easily, AND that I could take a picture of for all those totally-not-competitive-at-all pre 9am Facebook posts…and then we received a text from school to say that because of their trip to Cardiff Castle, my daughter’s year would need to wear school uniform after all…World Book Day Epic Fail Number Two.
Thankfully, my youngest is still in nursery, so I didn’t have to worry about a costume for him….though he would have been the easiest of the lot, given that we have a dressing up box full of superhero outfits, all of which he loves, and will wear at the slightest excuse. So imagine his distress (and my shame) when we rocked up to the Nursery entrance – to find it chock full of superheros. FFS. World Book Day Epic Fail Number Three.
Don’t know about you lot, but I’m glad the whole shebang is done with for another year!
As you can see there really isn’t much hope for me in the motherhood skillz arena. But if you think I’m a (slightly) better blogger than a mother, please feel free to nominate me in the MAD Blog Awards ‘Best New Blogger’ category – just click on the pretty pic below….THANK YOU!
