"Ana Has A Queen Amidala Costume That Might Wor. Work, Not Wor."

Ah, Third grade.  It's the grade that seems to have the most homework at our kids' school.  I'm really not exaggerating.  Riley is in third grade this year.  In two years, Kaleb will be in third grade, and I will be posting this exact same post only the name will be changed.
So every year, they make the third graders do about four thousand book reports and all of them seem to have some sort of project they have to do that goes along with it.  Woo hoo.  More work for me.  When Riley was in third grade, I helped him a lot.  I learned my lesson.  I don't really need to help out so much.  But this time, Riley needed a costume for his book report.  Sigh.  His book was The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland.  It's a good book with beautiful illustrations.  It's about a woman from Vietnam who comes to America during the Vietnam war.  The emperor of Vietnam gets one page of the story.  Guess which character Riley wanted to dress up as and review the story to his class dressed up as said character.  Yep.  The emperor.
So I googled emperor costumes and came up short.  I posted my dilemma on facebook, and my sister came to the rescue.  A few years back, her daughter wanted to be Queen Amidala for Halloween.  She's way more ambitious than me, and made her costume.  It is beautiful.  She mailed it to me and slipped a little surprise for the boys inside.  She's so awesome.  The boys were absolutely excited to find three HEXbugs inside the box with extra batteries.  Oh man.  Those things are awesome and they don't have the ones she sent us here.
Any way, I don't have a picture of my niece all dressed up in her costume, but I remember seeing one.  It was cute.

 I took a picture of the illustration so my sister could see what I needed.  See, it's a beautiful book.  She probably immediately thought of her costume.  I went online to see if there were any Queen Amidala costumes that looked right, so she wouldn't have to pay to mail it to me, but nothing was at all like what she sent, or like the picture above.

 My sister is an artist so she knows how to manipulate things, and suggested I take a milk jug and spray paint it gold and use that for his helmet.  I went to do that, but I wasn't quite sure what to do.  I said to myself, "But I do know how to manipulate paper.  I can do that!"  So I cut off the bottom of the milk jug, stuck paper to it, and painted it gold.  I even have some gold glitter paint, so I painted the edges of the fringe with that.  I also painted the "feather" with glittery swirls.  You can't really see it in the picture, though.

 Here's Riley all ready to go perform before school.  I didn't get to go see it. :(

This is his favorite pose for pictures.

I had to work.  Here is what he did when I said, "Okay, now let's get one where you look like a normal boy."   Doesn't he look handsome?

He brought this home from school today.

Thanks, Michele!  I think she gets the coolest aunt award today. :)