crown this

OK, so I am switching away from the lengthy list of crazy behavior exhibited by the nutty people I sit for.  It is your lucky day . . . I am picking up where I left off with more Irish dancing stories.  The crazy thing is after the dancing competition end of November, I always go home and enjoy life with very little stress.  So much for that - my 'door slam' incident set off a whole shit storm.  Trust me, there is more to tell there, but I thought you might need a little change up.

It was about 700 degrees in the venue where the awards for the older dancers were being announced.  Yuck.  I urged Mini to keep her distance from people as much as possible - although it had been almost 24 hours since her fever had reared its ugly head.  No Motrin all day.  Fingers crossed that she would stay healthy and not infect anyone else.

You will have to take my word for it, I am not the mom that ignores protocol and brings a kid out in public if they have recently had a fever.  Needless to say, I couldn't wait to escape this sauna and get back to our spacious room and crawl into bed.

Before we even made it into the awards area, we stopped by the vendors.  They were just about to close up shop.  Clusters of little booths lined the halls selling everything from sock glue and bloomers to new dresses and dance shoes.  Curly's new dress had arrived a month before but the people had failed to include her crown.  I emailed three times.  They were in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  I needed them to ship it over in a hurry so that I would have it in time for the competition.  The last thing I wanted to do (well, besides travel with a girl with a fever) was to have to shop for a pre-made headpiece upon arrival.

The first option we stumbled on.

Guess what?  Despite an email about 2 weeks in advance letting me know that they would be sending the headpiece that they forgot to include in the original shipment, it never arrived.  Mini and Curly and I now scoured the first booth we came to for a headpiece that would work.  We chose an orange one that would compliment the colors in her dress.  I wanted to run it past Curly's teacher first, so I asked the lady if she would set it aside for me.  Oh, and I asked her how much.  100 bucks.  For real?  It didn't look like it should be that expensive.  Of course I knew that buying a dancing necessity at the last minute was not going to be cheap.

Curly's teacher was helping at the awards stage.  When she had a second, I showed her the picture of the 100 buck beauty.  She suggested that I take the picture the next day to a different vendor.  This guy was her friend and she suspected that he would make something nice and charge me less.

This was what we selected, but the guy at the
booth was going to work with it to make
 it look a bit more like a crown.  Hard to see
in this pic but it had black behind the orange, which
 would look nice with the black background color on
the dress.  And to think some people
visit malls on Black Friday and do normal stuff.

On Saturday we had a short list of errands to run at the venue.  We needed to get our book that lists all of the competitors, finalize Curly's headpiece deal, buy a number holder for the new dress, and drop off the two dresses that we brought at the used dress room in hopes that we would be traveling home with money in our pocket and no more used dresses.  (Um, yeah - it didn't work out that way.  Nuts).  We also walked around and identified the stages Curly would be dancing at.  Once the lay of the land was complete, we headed back to the booth where Curly's new headpiece was being created.

Teacher was right.  Her friend agreed to make something for Curly that was far more fabulous than our first find.  He would charge us 40 bones.  Done.

Now the only thing we needed to do was go back to the hotel and lounge around in the comfort of our bonus room, continue to remain fever free, and wait for the big day.