rivka

I am so thrilled with our little robot, I can't even begin to tell you. Doesn't she look awesome?

Last night at the church Halloween party she was reluctant to wear her costume or join in the fun, and we wound up leaving shortly after we got there. I was afraid that Halloween would be a dud this year, and after Michael and I had expended so much energy on the costume. But this morning at the nursery school parade she was in fine form. While the kids were marching, she broke out with a stiff-legged walk and sang a few lines of a They Might Be Giants song:

In future times, children will work together
To build a giant cyborg
Robot parade, robot parade
Wave the flags that the robots made
Robot parade, robot parade
Robots obey what the children say

I contributed a bunch of design elements, but the costume construction was all Michael. He did a fantastic job. The body is made from a Rubbermaid plastic storage container. He cut out openings for her arms, legs, and head with a Dremel, sanded the edges, and padded them with duct tape for comfort. The container lid is fastened on with bolts and wingnuts to make the robot's back. At the last minute we had to shorten the costume when we discovered she couldn't sit or climb stairs.

She's wearing a worn-out shirt and leggings. Michael painted the clothes and robot body with "brushed aluminum" spraypaint. We decorated the body with pictures of meters and gauges taken from Google Images and printed on photo paper, as well as exciting light-up glowy things which we initially tried to glue on and subsequently wired into place. The cable circle on the front has colored chasing lights. Alex added the miscellaneous stickers on her own. She has a colander on her head. There's a little light-up glowy thing for her hair, too, but I couldn't find it until after the nursery school parade.

When she walked into the classroom, all the kids flocked to her and wanted to touch her costume. Miss Shelley had to invoke "the most important Yellowbird rule, 'no touching without permission'," but Alex didn't mind.

I was pleased to see that her class hasn't succumbed to the overwhelming cultural pressure that girls = princesses. There were three princesses, yes, but also among the girls were Spidergirl and Batgirl (wearing regular Spiderman and Batman costumes, not girly ones), a bat, a clown, and a monkey. The four-year-old class seemed more uniformly princessy, although I didn't get a good look at all of them.

Last but not least, here's an extremely short video in which Alex shows off her costume. The quality is pretty poor because I'm still getting the hang of our new camera - this was the first time I ever tried recording a video, and I hadn't worked out some setting issues. But you can still get the idea.