B_Anakin

Yes, my master..., originally uploaded by Ampersand Duck.

I'm so proud of myself. For every mistake as a parent, there's something I do right. No, I might rephrase that. For every clutch of mistakes, there's a winning moment. This, my dears, is one of them.

I didn't let Bumblebee watch Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on the big screen because I thought the Anakin/lava scene was just a bit too much, and obviously the censors thought so too, seeing how that that scene was about the only thing I could see that deserved an M rating. I'm sure lots of other parents curse George Lucas too, for making 5 movies ok for kids then making the final puzzle piece a bit too much for them. I made a deal with BB: when it came out on DVD, he could watch it on the small screen.

Then a friend offered me a pirate DVD of the movie. It felt a bit like a drug deal, but the short story is that BB got to see the movie not too long after the release. All the violent bits look much more harmless on our very small tv (my computer screen is bigger than our tv!) and we could skip through the burning bit -- at his request. One happy boy.

Anyhoo, that's not the good parenting bit (quite the opposite, some would argue!). Bumblebee has, as I've mentioned before, 3 lightsabres. Blue, green, purple. He still hankers after a double red one, so he can play Darth Maul.

Bumblebee had a dress-up school disco on Friday night, and we always like to make a dress-up effort in our household (last year's effort was Lord Voldemort). We'd had a miserable week preceding it, trapped in the house with a bad bout of gastro. I woke up one morning with a brainwave. A Jedi cape. If I could find it on the web, I could make one and BB could be Anakin, just before he becomes Darth Vader. Because in the movie, Anakin has a BLUE lightsabre, and that FINALLY made BB's blue one cool and brought it back out of the toybox.

Thank you so much to rebelligion.com for the excellent instructions on Jedi robe making. I just followed the wordsa and pared down the measurements to fit a skinny 8-yo kid, and look at the result. A bit of eyeliner pencil to draw in the eye-scar, some broody grey eyeliner around the lower rims, a bit of fudge in the hair, and a black glove (right hand only), and my mini-Anikin sprang forth. It was is a huge success. I don't think he's spent more than 6 hours without the robe on in the last four days.

Hooray!