Boo at the Zoo!
Several of the companies in Knoxville sponsor a Halloween-themed event
each year called Boo at the
Zoo, where kids can go trick-or-treating along a "treat
trail" set up along the zoo's main routes. There are many other
activities available as well, including dancing, party games, and
various characters you can have your pictures made with. My former boss
now runs one of the companies who was sponsoring the event, so I
managed to get free tickets for my little family and we headed off
early Saturday evening to wander about the Knoxville Zoo in search of
delicious treats and fun times.
Aisling
has decided to dress up like Princess Rosalina
from the video game Super Mario Galaxy this Halloween.
Rosalina is more than a simple princess, however -- she's in charge of
taking care of the cosmos, and she's a very wise and thoughtful
character. As far as the costume itself is concerned, we basically just
found a regular princess costume at our local department store -- but in Aisling's imagination, she's obviously embodying an almost
goddess-like creature. It was amusing to watch her "correct" people
around us who asked if she was being a princess or if she was being
Cinderella. "I'm Rosalina, protector of the Cosmos!" she'd say in a
very sharp, almost annoyed manner, and the parents would smile politely
while the kids that asked the question basically ignored her after this
point -- I'm assuming because I doubt they knew who in the world she
was talking about.
I should probably make an aside here and
confess that I've not made it particularly easy for Aisling to adopt
mainstream social interests that would help her better integrate with
her own age group. For years, we only owned vintage video game consoles
-- Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and a GameCube. As such, Aisling became
very well-acquainted with extremely old and outdated video games (the
original Mario series, old Final Fantasy games, etc.) which gave her
tons of "geek cred" with my friends, who remembered playing
these games when they were kids themselves, but this pretty much
isolated her from peers her own age who were playing wii and xbox
games. Now, partially thanks to my workplace and partially thanks to my
fiance, Thomas, she's playing video games on modern game consoles --
but she still maintains a great affinity with those old games, and and
she'll watch the walk-throughs on YouTube. In addition, most of the
people in her age group that are as obsessed with video games as she is
are boys, and most of them are of the age where they are becoming
extremely interested in the "violent video games" that Aisling doesn't
enjoy. Each year at Halloween, Aisling wants to dress up like an
obscure video game character. This makes it very difficult for anyone
to "get" what she's dressing up as when she goes trick-or-treating.
One
of the things that amused me about Aisling's Rosalina costume was her
facial expressions whenever we took a picture of her. She would always
close her eyes and tilt her head upwards whenever she would pose for a
photo, as if she were trying to be extremely regal. When I asked her
about this after the fact, she told me that she was just trying to look
"wise like Rosalina." She did not, however, explain to me why someone
needed to close their eyes in order to be wise.
At Boo at the Zoo, Thomas and I ran into a couple we
know on Twitter. They're a couple that really helped me understand how useful Twitter could be as a social networking tool about a year and a half
ago. I'd started following them because they were parents of a
high-functioning autistic / Asperger's Syndrome child who was a
teenager preparing for college. Reading their blog and their tweets
gave me a lot of hope for Aisling's future, and also helped me to feel
a little less alone in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. It was good
to read about other parents dealing with similar struggles and
celebrating similar victories who were working with the same school
system and resources that I was. It was really great to finally meet
this couple in person.
All in all, we had a really great time.
Aisling, as usual, was really only interested in the trick-or-treat
trail. She gets freaked out by loud noises, doesn't always understand
humor and jokes, and also has a strong fear of many general Halloween
items, such as ghosts and skeletons -- so she really didn't want to
participate in any of the other games or activities. Still, I think she
enjoyed dressing up in costume, looking at things, and really being Rosalina for
a couple of hours out of the day. And Thomas and I, for our part,
enjoyed spending time with Aisling, and getting her involved in
something that didn't include playing video games, talking about
rattlesnakes, or researching black holes for a change. :-)