She wanted to be Ned. Ned the Brachiosaurus from Dinosaur Train.

I will admit that I tried to change her mind.

“How about Buddy or Tiny? They are both on Dinosaur Train” we said (you can actually buy these costumes).

“No. I want to be Ned” she said.

“How about pac man?” we asked. “Daddy and I could be ghosts, you could be Pac Man, and Ben could one of those floating pieces of fruit. We could even make your walker in to the maze! How cool would that be?”

Instead of excitement, we got a whimper and a whine of, “but I want to be Ne-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ed” with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen.

OK. Sure. We can turn a young girl into a 4 legged long neck dinosaur.

Right?

Well, I may not have written a blog post in 3 weeks, and I was short quite a bit of sleep, but WE DID IT!

May I present … Ned, the Junior Conductor.

We started with 2 “dino rider” costumes from Walmart (costumes you wear as suspenders that look like you are riding the dinosaur, but that were the wrong color and type of dinosaur – which we got for 50% off – score!), lots of painting supplies and three super-cheap orange fleece blankets.

We deconstructed the costumes:

• Head/neck
• Legs/tail
• Removed the short little arms (a Brachiosaurus doesn’t have these)

I took one of the head/neck pieces and sewed it onto a winter hat from Old Navy (one with under the chin velcro straps). I left the stuffing in the head to give us the right shape.

The original plan was to paint the material orange using acrylic paint and a fabric medium, but we couldn’t get the right color and the material got weird and hard. So, instead, we covered all the pieces with orange fleece (head, legs, tail … everything)!

We left the suspenders on one of the legs/tail pieces so that she could wear them. The other set were attached to the back of her walker using heavy duty velcro. I also made a VERY simple shirt for her to wear over the suspenders. It had a long flap on the back which we layer over the top of the back of the walker to connect her (head and front feet) to the back feet and tail.

Once the head was covered in orange fleece, I used felt to make the eyes and to put black into the mouth. The hat is made out of white felt, black and yellow felt (white parts painted with red acrylic paint).

I was so excited (and tired, really tired, but mostly excited) when it was finished.

She loved it. So. Much. Made all the effort totally worth it.

How was your Halloween?