It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday!  This is the day to enjoy reading a Dr. Seuss book, no matter how old you are.  Stop by your local library and look for one you haven’t read before!  That’s how we found Scrambled Eggs Super! (reviewed here).  If you’ve never read I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew (reviewed here), you should!

Reading a library book is easy.  But what if you, or your child, are invited to a Dr. Seuss costume party?  What if you don’t have time to make a Mayzie Bird tail or a Fiffer-Feffer-Feff suit, the stores are all sold out of Grinch masks and those red-and-white striped hats, and you don’t even have a yellow shirt on which to stick a belly star?

Our 3-year-old Lydia was invited to dress as a Dr. Seuss character for preschool today.  Awakening at 2:00 a.m. from a nightmare about being an incompetent parent in other ways, I began worrying that she would freak out as she did on Sesame Street day, demanding that we make a Big Bird costume in the morning before school.

Daniel and I tossed around ideas over breakfast.  Lydia’s hair has gotten too long for the Cindy Lou Who hairstyle.  I gave her a red top and pants, thinking I could braid her hair and she’d be Rosy Robin Ross–but then I realized it’s the rhinoceros who is red, and Rosy wears neutral-colored clothes.  She could be Thing 1 or Thing 2, with a paper circle taped to her chest, but without the blue wig that’s not so great….

Then Daniel had a good idea.

Image from The Sneetches and Other Stories, copyright 1961, renewed 1989 by Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

Lydia happens to own a pair of pale green pants!  And they were clean!!  She went off to school as the brave protagonist of the short story “What Was I Scared Of?” who is afraid of the mysterious pale green pants with nobody inside ’em but then learns that the pants are afraid, too, and befriends them.

Luckily, perhaps because of the cold weather, Lydia did not argue that she should wear no clothes, like the protagonist.  Nor did she demand a furry suit with ears, sideburns, and tail.  Whew!

The great thing about a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside ’em is that they don’t have to be any particular size.  We could just keep these pants after Lydia outgrows them and use them for every Seuss-celebrating occasion!

If you happen to spot a pair of pale green pants in a thrift shop, consider picking them up for emergencies.  (Don’t worry; you are just as strange to them as they are strange to you.)  It’s nice not to be the one family in the class who totally failed to attempt a costume!