The Mime

(warning: this posted is heavily-hyphenated)

Today Littlest Bean is performing in her Kindergarten talent show. She is going to be a mime, I'm full of all sorts of pride, mainly I am delighted she isn't following blindly in my footsteps and doing ballet. She chose something that isn't particularly girly and nobody else is doing, and pink for once is not making up any part of her outfit.

The outfit, prrrrt. I couldn't decide whether to buy her something or make do right up until school pick-up yesterday. I picked her up after school with Cuddles in tow and had this stroke of genius, go to Khols with your 3 and 5 years olds, who are hungry AND tired, and shop for clothes. The shop thankfully is visible from the school so we were there quickly and nobody ever goes there so there was loads of parking. Cuddles actually wanted to sit in a cart and everything was going swimmingly.

It quickly transpired that Littlest Bean thought we had come shopping for a bikini for her to wear to the end-of-year school beach party (yes she's 5 not 15), so I had to take the wind out of her sails a little. We couldn't find quite what I wanted for the costume but LB's eyes became wide at the endless rails of drop-waisted, synthetic, faux-cardiganed, black and neon dress-things. Whilst i found these dress-things vulgar to say the least she obviously couldn't believe her luck at the beautiful and extremely grown-up dress-things-a-six-year-old-would-wear at the end of every aisle. Crap. She is shy and timid at school (at home and with close friends the complete opposite) and had just been telling me about playing on her own at lunch. I want to boost her self-esteem and make her feel good about herself so I didn't want to veto all her ideas if a zebra stripe with neon pink faux cardigan dress-thing would make her feel good about herself. Here is the actual dress-thing LB fell totally in love with. According to the site I think I should be calling it a mock-layer dress-thing but that seems overly complicated. Her argument was that it had white and black horizontal stripes, she is right,  but I've never seen a mime dressed in one of these.

Now I hadn't slept well the night before last, which severely hampers my ability to make decisions. What followed was a huge parenting fail, two trips to the changing rooms, circuits made around and around the children's section, me flitting from saying maybe to making her choose between getting what I wanted her to get AND a new swimsuit or her mock-layer dress-thing only. We had tears, almost from me, I put things back on the rail, I put them back in the basket several times. I almost gave up and just left. I realized the price of the dress-thing was really high, especially as the material was not nice at all. I would have bought it for her in the end, but whereas everything else in the store was about half price, these were two for the price of one. Two mock-layer dress-things? No thank you. After about 45 minutes of sheer ridiculousness with two actually surprisingly well-behaved but bored kids I managed to make a decision and bought her a tshirt with horitzontal zebra stripes (closest I could find), a matching skirt (because I'm THAT weak) and a swimsuit, it all came to $25 so not bad. I don't want her to wear the skirt for the mime but she is going to anyway. I am split between laying down the law and helping her confidence at school. She has a black hat to wear and I'm going to paint her face like a mime so I'm sure she'll look fine and it will be great.

I need to go and buy some red lipstick to paint a little heart on her lips and then head to the school to help get her ready. Hopefully Cuddles will reign it in a little today, he has to attend the talent show twice, that's asking quite a lot of 3.5 year old boy. I'll let you know how it all goes.