Miser Mom: Super Hero Dinner

A super family.

My family has special dinners about once a month. This month, we decided all of a sudden to have a "Super Hero" dinner, which mostly means dressing up in super hero costumes. We had a hard time thinking what super heroes eat, but we finally decided "Pizza and Beer"*, because they usually eat while assuming the identity of their alter egos. Plus, apparently Peter Parker was a pizza delivery guy when he wasn't a photographer.

* Disclaimer: almost all of my kids are legally

allowed to drink beer, and we also served root beer.

A friend suggested "Kale/Quinoa salad", because those are super foods, so we added that in and thereby had something moderately healthy to eat, too. Except that this week we got a huge amount of beet greens and radish greens in our CSA box, and no kale, so we had a "root vegetable greens-and-quinoa" salad instead of a kale-and-quinoa salad, and we still called that super foods.

I also decided, since we were celebrating super heroes, to invite someone I know that I've admired for a while. She dressed as "super professor", as you can see here in this photo.

You might not think of a theater professor as being particularly heroic, but she's traveled much of the world on her own or with one or two other people. A while back, she particularly fell in love with Nepal, and decided to do a twist on Tibetan monk performances by starting her own performing company there to wander up out into the hills surrounding Katmandu and do performances about health and hygiene. Her local actors performed skits about the importance of washing hands and of building toilets and of feeding pregnant women. Their troop reached something like a half a million people before the war broke out and it became too dangerous to hike into the mountains. Now she maintains a smaller company (two people) who work with war orphans in the city of Katmandu to use theater as a way of dealing with tragedy and aiming for hope. It was fabulous having her tell her story -- heck, her stories -- to my kids.

Captain Adorable, trying on her costume.
She thinks capes are annoying.

If you ever have a Super Hero dinner of your own, I highly recommending someone you admire a lot but haven't ever had over to your house. It's a fabulous way to make rich connections.

I also recommend making super hero costumes out of just about anything you have at hand. Prewash (aka "Captain Adorable") would disagree with me and say that costumes are for biting at. Dog costumes don't last very long, so definitely don't splurge on those.

But for people, t-shirt sleeves can be cut to make awesome masks. The ends of socks make great wrist bands. A pillowcase attached with binder clips is a great cape . . . good enough, in fact, that you can fly from one room of the house to another . . .