Awesome Disabled

It was 7:45 in the evening when Cleo, my 11-year-old, ran into my room yelling, “Tomorrow is Dress Up As Your Favorite Character Day! I need to make a Sisu costume!”

This follows the cherished tradition of remembering a Big Project the Day Before, then announcing it in a blind panic at top volume.

For normal children, who choose humanoid characters, this costume-planning process would involve finding clothing items. But for Cleo, Dress Up As Your Favorite Character Day involves making elaborate semi-puppet costumes of giant non-human fantasy creatures. Last year, she went as Sparks from the graphic novel of the same name (also a dragon). This year, she’s decided on Sisu from the Raya movie.

So, we began to start our dragon costume journey, in pretty short order, because it was less than twelve hours to go time, and that needed to include sleep time. Cleo piled up all of the cardboard she could find (some of which she had to dump my stuff out of…). I flattened all the boxes, and we found we had a large piece for the head, a larger piece that would work for the body, and a few bits and bobs that would work for other parts. Cleo’s been making crafts out of household items for a decade, so she’s old hat with this stuff.

We decided to loop in Lis, who has been drawing dragons since coming out of the womb. Cleo pulled up a reference image of the dragon in question, and Lis took off. Once Lis sketched out the pieces, I cut them out and we soon had a dragon! I stapled the pieces together, and the kids colored them in. It looked pretty good, despite our short timeline.

“It looks great!” Cleo says. “Thanks for helping me.”

At the end of the day, it’s best to come together to solve a problem, rather than being upset about the forgetfulness that got us into this problem in the first place. Also, heaven knows I have forgotten many an assignment last minute throughout my time in school, so I can’t be too hard on Cleo. I can react in a way that I wished someone had reacted to me during my adolescence as an undiagnosed, unsupported autistic dreamer.

It was a seriously kick-ass dragon, and Cleo got a ton of compliments about it the next day. Cleo passed on compliments to Lis specifically, and reiterated her thanks for sketching out Sisu. Plus, we got some major family bonding, and some serious confidence-building to boot!

Here’s what Sisu looked like: