May Showers

If April showers bring May flowers, then what do May showers bring?  Well, in our school district they brought inspiration for the Vocabulary Parade!!  So what's a Vocabulary Parade, you ask?  It's an event where you dress up as a vocabulary word and parade around the school for all the parents and teachers to see.  We decided to team up on this project with Best Buddy Andrew.  By "we", I mean Andrew's mom Brandy & I thought it would be a great idea if the boys coordinated their costumes.  It was a great idea.  Really.  You know, they could go as Hot and Cold.  Or Sunny and Cloudy -- that way when they were together they would be partly cloudy.  Get it?  Partly Cloudy?  How clever is that?!

Anyway, our brilliant idea of working together really didn't turn out so brilliantly.  The boys' great ideas didn't synch up with the Moms' great ideas.  Jake wanted to be a cat and Andrew wanted to be a dog.  We managed to talk them into being "Raining Cats & Dogs", and while it wasn't exactly a single vocabulary word, it did manage to use 3 words from their list.  So, with the decision made, we rummaged through drawers and closets, hit up a couple of stores and ended up with exactly what we needed to transform our boys.

We taped some tinsel-y rain to black umbrellas, strung up a bunch of cats and dogs, and stuck on some foamy letters so there would be no doubt as to what the get up was representing.  And while the boys were more interested in having "predator showdowns" between the cats and the dogs...

...they seemed pretty pleased with their finished products.

And on the day of the parade, the weather cooperated perfectly.  It rained cats and dogs!  There was no partly cloudy to this day.  It was all rain, wind...and a few tornado warnings -- which, of course meant another camp out in the closet at our house.  But that's springtime in Texas for ya -- and another story for another time.