November 12, 2022
Dressing the Part
Christina likes to dress up. She turns into “Christy the Elf” after Thanksgiving and loves dressing up to our themes at work. This Halloween is the first we’ve lived in a community where people actually trick-or-treat! This made her super excited! She had Jaquline’s big speaker outside playing creepy and fun Halloween songs (some were soundtracks to different movies, others were funny like “the Monster Mash”). She had invited a bunch of friends but most had other plans and attending a friend’s Halloween “party on my driveway giving away candy” is not a valid excuse to play hooky from work.
One of her best friends showed up – in a totally amazing costume my nerdy girls loved! – and these two college girls goofed off and enjoyed giving away candy to all the trick-or-treaters. A table of glowing fun candles and cute props, two smiling young ladies handing out candy, and a bunch of spare candy bags hiding just inside the door made for hours of fun.
Christina worked our October Parents’ Night Out where the coaches are encouraged to dress up.
Before she left, she was crawling around the house “getting into the dog character” just to make all the little ones laugh. Christina knows how to make little ones laugh. Maybe that’s why she excels as a preschool coach.
Louis looked at me, “what in the Earth?” because, you know, she is nineteen. Or is she?
I love that they have the freedom to dress up and play pretend and goof off – one has to feel very confident in their own skin in order to act silly in front of others. It is amazing how my girls’ first jobs give them options to be silly. We dress up (okay, not me, but the other coaches do), we goof off with each other and our kids (yes, I goof off with the preschoolers and tots), and yet all of us are very professional about our job. We love our kiddos! We want the best for them!
I always take time to do fun kid things with my children. Thea wants to play legos (we set up the lego base boards and each gets a spot to build). Lucas wants to play boggle with Thea (yes, they both get words now, it’s almost scary – Thea won one round because she had a 3-letter that beat Lucas’ two-letter and she’s told everyone!). We spend family day(Sunday) with at least one board game like Monopoly or Risk. We do silly dance parties or sing karaoke. Sometimes we have been known to spend hours watching parakeets or guinea pigs or lizards or chickens while narrating (speaking for the poor animals).
Sometimes when you are being silly, you totally dress the part – like Christina.
Sometimes it helps to make you join in all the silliness and pretend you are a part of a world where imagination reigns. Crawling around like whatever animal you are pretending to be, making the littles squeal with joy and run from you, or pretend they are “protecting” and wrestle you; always make time for “silly” memories. When I think back, some of the most heart-warming memories with elder members of my family were the silly ones (i.e. my granny at eighty-something throwing cartwheels to teach a group of us kids how to do it, running through the sprinklers with my Daddy, “braving” the rain from a Sams Club with my mom) and then the ones I remember making with my siblings and children… twirling in the middle of a flower garden, singing silly songs on bike rides, people-watching on the bayfront, tickle wars, covering kiddos with sheets and “smashing them” while I try to fold sheets or make beds, reading stories that will never be published as they shred them apart with kid-questions, letting them “cook” stuff in Star Ocean while we fold clothes, etc. Silly stuff we remember as so much fun.
Enjoy your silly memory-making moments and don’t be scared to “dress your part” if the mood hits to be silly!
Thank you for Reading!
Type at you later!
~Nancy Tart
