Bumblebee Goes To School For Story Book Day

**Updated on 4 Dec 2013

Obviously, I just wanted to get as much mileage as I could out of Rockstar’s hard-to-find-ordered-ages-in-advance-off-Amazon.com Bumblebee Plasma Cannon (which is actually Bumblebee’s fist) we got for Halloween. You’re supposed to go as a book character…. unless you can find a book about the character you want to go as. Does that make sense? Yes, as a matter of fact, it do. Why?

BECAUSE BUMBLEBEE PLASMA CANNON.

Bumblebee wears school fleece because the bus stop we walk to to get on the bus is usually the coldest part of the day/journey and why yes, he just woke up. As usual 😀

Rockstar was a little bored of Bumblebee (I know. He’s spoilt. They should put spoiled kids in jail because I’ve had too much caffeine) and originally thought of going as Iron Man because one of his friends had lent us the readers, but I couldn’t find anything to add a little “oomph” to the recycled 2-Halloweens-ago outfit. YES, HE CAN STILL WEAR IT. Sigh. The Iron Man and Avengers readers however did inspire me to go looking for Transformers readers (hadn’t occurred to me they even existed before).

Quite happy to have discovered these, because Rockstar is naturally very heavily skewed towards non-fiction reading – he went through a phase of looking out for the Mr Men during Kindy, which was great at that age because instead of coming away with the impulse-bought toy (Legos!), we often left a mall/store with a Mr Men to add to his collection. I consider this a reflection of what a good parent I am which is usually about when parenting gives you that much-humbling kick in the self-esteem and you get a call from the principal’s office about your child doing drugs on the playground.

So NO I DON’T CONSIDER THIS A REFLECTION OF GOOD PARENTING JUST DUMBBB LUCK THAT I AM PARENT TO MR ANAL RETENTIVE and this is how we do the whole superstitious ward-off-evil signs in Parentingland and Starbucks while younger child naps. Because if you don’t do this and you don’t get called about your child’s drug-trafficking on the playground <various signs to ward off evil> your younger child will then wake screaming and proceed to be a terrible person, necessitating you leave St. Arbucks and the rest of your turkey-and-cranberry sandwich behind as suitable sacrifice to the pagan gods of parenting.

Wow, the Christmas season gingerbread latte is lethal. 

But Mr Men. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise I hadn’t simply bought Rockstar the whole complete box series (cos I’d bought like, 10 books, before then realizing you could buy a whole set), because it became a game to find one he didn’t have yet. Of course, once or twice we ended up buying duplicates. (See how I warded off evil there?)

So here we go

Not… to be confused with comic books, you understand… Who knew readers were that much fun?

Rockstar read these things really quickly, like, 4 or 5 in a night when I first got them. At least for the Avengers ones we borrowed. I could only find 3 Transformers ones at Toys Club. (He devoured those too).

And ok, there was another thought going at the back of my obsessive compulsive mind: Dress As A Book Character Day also marked the end of Rockstar’s weeklong Youtube Fast (item 6 in this post). I was looking for a relatively lo-risk chance to do a little erm, revision on the lesson: Can he hold it in if his friends hog his cannon, jostle him playing with it, don’t give it back for awhile, etc etc etc? Or if it breaks?

(I consider it a good opportunity because while the cannon is of some value to Rockstar, it’s not “over-the-top valuable” – Halloween is now over, Rockstar’s had the chance to play with it for some time already, it’s however still attractive enough to Rockstar’s friends that some might run off with it for awhile longer than my fusspot firstborn stipulates. All-in-all a very attractive relatively “controlled environment practice run”. I know – sounds a lot less weird when I’m referring to stress testing of some derivative investment product 😛 but if I’m honest then this is what went through my head <sheepish>)

Me: You know there’s a chance if you bring it it’ll get trashed, right?

Rockstar: <rolls eyes> I….. know…… They do that stuff all. The. Time. <been-there-done-that-it’s-terrible-but-I’ll-live-if-only-just-barely sigh>

Me: OK so you understand: You just came out of having given up Youtube time for a week. You wig out again especially so soon after your last stunt you’re looking at a much heavier punishment. Plus, people might not believe you next time you give your word you’re not doing it again, if you break it so soon after. Still want to bring it?

Rockstar: <gravely> Yeah. I’ll be…. prepared. (Kind of with the weight of his decision on his shoulders)

I wasn’t very. I was saying little prayers throughout the day, especially since Rockstar oversleeps that morning (which he does almost half the mornings because he finds it hard to get to sleep at night) and as a result I’m the one holding his Plasma Cannon and speed walking to the bus stop while he’s trying to finish his breakfast sandwich because he woke literally 8 minutes before we got out the door (those mornings you’re basically putting a school uniform on a still-asleep rag doll of an offspring who towards the end of “getting dressed” would have woken sufficiently to be giggling somewhere in the depths of the school fleece you’re trying to get on), when the first of his friends sees it and starts messing with it.

Bumblebee or Incredible Sulk

This sets off The Incredible Sulk who wanted to be the one to show it off at the bus stop and so I hurriedly snap at him to get ahold of himself because it just so happened he’d overslept from having a reunion with his beloved Youtube and in the first place this is a practice run for controlling his temper, and bundle a slightly less sulky Transformer onto the bus after he takes a final bite of his sandwich.

(It would turn out I needn’t have worried because practice run for controlling temper was even more of a controlled environment than expected – Rockstar would tell me later there’d been an announcement over the PA system before playtime to leave all wands, swords, light sabers and plasma cannons in class before going down to play, to avoid injury. I…. hadn’t thought of that. It was more efficient than those public schools you hear of in the States where they have the metal detectors in case their middle schoolers “g*ng-b*ng”***SEE BOTTOM OF POST FOR UPDATE. Which is kind of great, since the chances of g*ng-b*ng-ing and someone getting shot or stabbed with a Harry Potter magical wand that lights up and makes magical sounds are lower. (Touch wood! They are, right? Because we’ve got one too, Little Miss waves it around a lot at feeding time.))

And SO, in slightly breathless tones, Rockstar would narrate how his friends had come dressed as everything from Peter Pan to the Cat in the Hat (“BIG hat. Huge.”), to Leonardo of the Ninja Turtles, to Kai of Ninjago, to various Jedi….. And I was just amazed at the getting kids to find reading fun. Rockstar would later tell me they all showed off their costumes and talked about what characters they were…… One friend was “a very dressed up shark and his mummy read a book about sharks – he was a really, really cool shark.” Rockstar is not a Disney or Dr Seuss person, so he learned a lot of other magical book characters, that day.

And at the end of the day, books are awesome. And, to my heavily non-fiction-skewed firstborn, fiction can be awesome.

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ps: Speaking of Halloween, there were people who asked me if we went for Rockstar’s school Halloween since I didn’t post about it – yes, we went. Yes, there was a post in my drafts folder. The reason I didn’t put it up was because it was heavily skewed towards The Cheese Brothers, the clown show that has been at Halloween for both years we’ve been at Kennedy School and I didn’t want to give the impression that was the only thing going on that night – there’s a lot more. Thing is, both years, it’s virtually the only thing we’ve really seen because Rockstar never leaves the clown show. He’s not for the spooky bits (though he loves the spiders), he wandered in randomly his first Halloween at the school, and hasn’t wanted to leave since. We buy several hundred dollars worth of tickets each year because Rockstar sits in the show back to back and a lot of the time we’d like to get to sit in there too. 

Bumblebee and Cheesie (someone please scream at me if this is not ok to put up, it’ll be gone immediately)

Little Miss was there too. And “Put it away, Mu-umm” (Rockstar’s expression is because I kept trying to take pics of those two during the performance)

***Update: “G*ng-b*ng” refers to this term I picked up from this piece of art by (I think) a middle-schooler:

The theme of this exhibit at the Children’s Creativity Museum (formerly Zeum) in San Francisco was the American Dream, which I posted about when we visited there, and I’d then used the term in this current post thinking it conveyed the whole metal-detectors-in-American-public-schools tone. However, an eagle-eyed reader (thank you) then warned me that the official Wikipedia meaning for the term is quite cringe-worthy and so I went back and cleaned my text so it wouldn’t show up on a google search. 

(And btw I sometimes don’t link things for the same reason; I don’t want some sites to find me easily. I’m aware some of these may hurt say, my Alexa ranking, and I dub this the paradox of the mummy blogger – on one hand you want to record your parenting and talk about your kids, you don’t want a bloodless blog, on the other hand you then have to give up a little on the “commercial” side because I challenge that it is very, very difficult to produce a popular, fast growing blog without attracting haters, spam or some other form of the scum of the internet universe.)