Not a tame lion

We are throwing a birthday party for Gracie. I sent out invites on Paperless Post, in the shape of a carousel, because the party will be at Schenley Plaza and all the kids will get to ride on the PNC Carousel. Since we're having it at the Plaza, and not at a playground, I need to come up with activities for the kids to do. (The Plaza has a good square of grass, but it's boxed in by streets; the kids are safe but the parents will have to be watchful. It's not a place that permits mindless wandering.)

One of the games we thought of is a bean bag toss (non-competitive). We were going to make a game of "feeding the lion" and throwing them into a box with the cut out of a "mouth". Then we decided it would be more fun to knock things down, so we're going to have the kids throw the bean bags at stacks of empty boxes. Tower-toppling is still cool when you're three, right? And then David thought we could still use the lion idea by making it into a photo opp---where kids put their head in the lion's mouth for a picture.

Turns out, we had different ideas of how that would look. I was imagining one of those flat boards in an amusement park--the kind that make you look like you're wearing clothes of a different era--where you pop your head through and smile.

David was going for something more realistic.




This was what he made, after looking at photos of real lions. The mouth actually moves. He said it was designed after Aslan.

Not a tame lion.

He realized immediately that asking our girl to put her head through this lion's mouth was going to result in protests and possibly tears--and that her younger friends would have the same reaction. Knowing our girl, she would come to associate birthdays with lion's heads, and we would have to rehash the parental blunder every time she thought of it, "Why da lion Dadda? Why Gayce not want to take a picture?"

After he stopped laughing, my sweet husband started over. He found a picture of a stuffed lion--I will post the results when he's done. :)

Love this man--he will spend a quiet Sunday evening tearing up boxes for our little girl and her mama.

L