Fancy Dress Event at the school

Treehouse was having its annual fancy dress event. Akshara’s batch (the playschool group) was asked to choose costumes of any cartoon character. We searched east, west, north and south in Pune to find a good costume for her. But, the only ones which every store had were the costumes of Spiderman and Superman! For girls, it was only the Rabbit costume! We were given the reference of 2 stores close to M.G.Road which specialized in carnival costumes. But, they were giving them only for rent and by the look of the dresses, it seemed that they needed 2 or 3 rounds of dry cleaning before one could wear it.

Finally, Vidhya decided to go the DIY way. We got a polka-dotted dress and with the help of few accessories, we convinced Akshara that she looks like Minnie Mouse. Surprisingly, Akshara managed to keep on the headgear on her head all the time.

We were very apprehensive of how Akshara would react on walking on to the stage. She had never been on a stage before and given her aversion to huge crowds, we sensed that it may not go as expected. But, she walked onto the stage, didn’t cry or do anything traumatic. Instead, she did her usual ostrich-thing (if i don’t look at you, that means you are not looking at me!). It was a great day in the end with Akshara and her pals enjoying their fancy dresses and fancy looks!

The best part was when she even uttered “Minnie Mouse” on the stage. This was it, her first words on a stage – “Minnie Mouse” 🙂

Then, one day we were told that the class is currently being taught about community workers and that the kids should come dressed up as one. So, off we went again in search of “community worker” and the shopkeepers recommended Spiderman (again!), a monkey, an elephant and few others who would be better off in the jungle rather in the city. By luck, we came across a military uniform in one of the shops. We were impressed by the dress (and also tired of searching) and agreed with Akshara that she would go as a military officer. She even practised the march past that she had originally learnt for the sports day.

But, what happened in the 30 minutes before she left for school was unexpected. We were finding it difficult to get Akshara to understand the “Military Officer” concept. So, we changed the costume name to that of a policeman (or woman). She knew the “policeman” very well, with us having used his name often while travelling in the car to get her to sit in one place. The Policewoman was all ready and we started for school. Once she got out of the lift and saw someone, she had a sudden realization! A realization that her costume looked similar to the one worn by the Magarpatta Security guys!!! So, in an instant, she rechristened herself as “Security”. We had no choice, but to go with this newly renamed costume. Thus, the story ended with Akshara dressing up as a “Security” person. She even gave a demo of how a magarpatta security person would be discharging his duties…

With Hari dressed up as a “Vegetable Seller”, Akshara good a good opportunity to demonstrate the useless activities which the security people here do, like checking each and every vegetable for bomb-like symptoms, but ignoring big packages with “bomb” written on them!

The fact that the TV channels were showing Salman’s dance in Munni Badnam Hui too often was clearly visible with Akshara displaying various dance moves in her “security” costume.