For a lot of my life I didn’t even bother trying to fit in. I was clearly weird and I kind of liked that about myself. As I grew up, I learned, at least partially, to adjust my weirdness levels to fit whatever group I was in, so that even if people thought of me as the strange one, it at least seemed to be in a mostly affectionate way.
Now that I have a family I fear that my weirdness has spilled over and been passed down to future generations, as evidenced by crazy hat day at school today. Oh wait, is it crazy hat day today? Now that I am re-reading all of the materials that we were sent, it appears to be “hat day.” Huh. I wonder, at what point did my brain decide to insert crazy into the equation? I’m guessing fairly instantly.
So it is [crazy]hat day at school today, as well as class color day, which is when each class is assigned a color and everybody wears that color to school. Ruby’s class color is red, which is good, because even her name is wearing red, and I decided that the whole family should wear red to show some class spirit. Apparently this is not normal.
So we arrive at school this morning looking as follows: Edward is wearing bright red track pants, a red t-shirt, and totally by coincidence is holding a red train and a red firetruck. I am wearing my red Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark t-shirt (which can be seen in this video) and maroon workout shorts that completely do not match the shirt. Ruby is wearing a red plaid dress with red shorts on underneath and on top of her head is a huge green cone-shaped party hat with white polka dots that is also trimmed with white feathers around the bottom and sticking out the top as well. In this manner, we all entered her classroom.
Some of the other kids were wearing hats, but baseball hats. Or maybe, at their craziest, floppy fishing hats. Almost everyone was wearing something with red on it, but I don’t think anyone else came close to the amount of redness that we walked through that door. If there was an award for class spirit/insanity, our family definitely would have won it.
Which brings me back to my main point. I think we’re the weird family. We don’t seem to do things quite like the other families. We try really hard to be normal, but somehow we just get it a little wrong. I’m not sure if we know what normal is. I didn’t really think there was a normal, but all the other families seem to be it. Oh well. Luckily my kids don’t seem to care. Yet.