Of a Superhero Birthday Party

The primary purpose of our trip 'cross the Midwest this past weekend was to join in the first birthday celebration for our beautiful niece.  This wonderful event (the party, not the actual birthday) occurred on Sunday and followed a superhero theme.  All guests were invited to dress as their favorite superhero.

Now, we don't tend to have any comic book costumes on-hand, so I was drawing a blank as to how into this dressing-up concept we needed to be.  Emmett has a Superman t-shirt and Micaiah has a crocheted blanket I tied into a cape when I was younger, which has remained such ever since.  I thought that would be as far as it went.

And then I thought to ask Micaiah who her favorite superhero actually was.  I expected an answer along the lines of Spiderman, one of the cartoons she watches with Daddy on Netflix.  But, instead, her response was immediate, "Word Girl!"

For those of you non-PBS watchers (or, rather, non-PBS-Kids watchers), Word Girl is the nerdiest super hero out there.  Only the best for our girl.  I realized, though, that nerdy as she may be, her pink(ish - depending on the light) costume may actually be simple enough to replicate.  And, even, better, she has a monkey side-kick - the perfect role for little man.

This, then, became my goal:  make our children resemble this picture in less than 36 hours (yes, I asked her this enlightening question the day before we hit the road):

On top of my limited time-frame, I also had to figure in the fact that we have been in the midst of a season-long heat wave here across the midwest, so a long-sleeve shirt and leggings were probably not the best option.  Thus, I decided our children would don Word Girl and Captain Huggy-Face's summer ensembles.  Digging through their drawers, I found just the right pieces and made a plan.

And for only a couple of hours work, I would say these aren't half-bad:

In fact, the greatest amount of work actually went to Gram, who knitted those headbands on her hours-long road trip to Silver Dollar City, per my last-minute request.

Unfortunately, my thinking ahead kind of flopped, as the weather peaked at about 75 degrees that day.  Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Either way, she had a blast in her costume, as ghetto as it may have been.  And Emmett even kept his hat on most of the day (only after his sister strategically killed the antenna, though, which had been uncomfortably poking him in the head).  What cuties!

And with even less planning, Philip and I decided to get in on the act:

For the un-informed, this was our inspiration:

Fortunately, other than the $2.25 we spent on fabric, the rest of our ensembles were also from found/borrowed items - I say "fortunately" because we wore them for all of about five minutes before feeling awkward enough to dress like normal people again.

Either way, we had a great day celebrating little Amie with her family.  Micaiah enjoyed meeting Amie's cousins on her mommy's side and Emmett, as always, enjoyed the food.

Flying elephants and super-heroes - what a weekend!