This year I doctored up my son’s sweats to create his Halloween costume. He is a HUGE (I repeat HUUUUGE) Muppets fan. He favors Kermit, since he’s sort of the leader of the pack, but would have been happy being Fozzy or Animal. While searching online for Muppets costumes, I found a serious lack of cute ones available for purchase (for toddlers). I stumbled upon a craft site that had a picture of another mom’s Kermit creation. It looked easy enough, and after having copied the creative mom’s idea, I can say it really WAS easy.

First off, where the heck are the green sweats??? I had to dye some heather gray sweats. No big deal - it worked perfectly with RIT’s Kelly Green dye powder. My friend suggested I use styrofoam balls as the eyes, rather than the stuffed eyeballs the costume in the picture had. This worked great. I just glued on some black “Kermit pupils” and used a Tapestry/Upholstery needle to sew them onto the top of the hood. I then cut triangles out of lime green felt and sewed them around the base of the hood.

Ta-Dah! Kermit:

First Ever BlueSkyRocket Story Writing Contest Winners:
Emily & Totton!

Congratulations guys! Enjoy the Gift Certificate

There were several stories submitted, some coming in right as I was getting the contest wrapped up. I hated to prolong the contest since some of the entries came in back in the summer - I didn’t want those kids to forget that there was even a contest going on - but I did end up taking a bit longer anyway due to the back to school madness and a couple of short family trips. SO… thank you everyone for being incredibly patient. Also, Thank you to everyone wrote and helped write these amazing Simon the Squirrel stories. I would say our First Story Writing Contest was a success!

World, remember these names, as they are sure to be amazing writers:
Braden, Rowan, Cedar, Linden, Ava, Emily, Totton, Hunter, Kaleigh & her Mommy, Twila & Sarah

The story will be added onto Captain Simon’s Space (B)log, so when future contest winner’s stories are chosen they will join the previous winners stories there.

Here’s Emily & Totton’s winning Story:

Captain Simon’s Space Adventure
By Totton, age 4 with a little help from Emily, age 15

Once upon a time in Atlanta, Georgia there lived a squirrel named Captain Simon. Captain Simon was four years old and loved the color green, mac `n cheese and football. But what Captain Simon really loved were superheroes and flying rocket ships. The squirrel really wanted to visit his cousins, who lived on Neptune,
but buying a rocket ship was too expensive for Captain Simon. He decided to build his own. His one hope for the rocket ship was that it would never break, but he wasn’t sure how to do that.

Besides Neptune, Captain Simon’s favorite place was the park. He loved to swing on the baby swings. One day when he was on the swing set, Captain Simon saw something in the sky. At first, it looked like a cloud, but as it got closer, he could see there were two people, no, superheroes swinging and flying through the sky.

Look! There was another one running so fast he was a blur of red and yellow. When they all came to a stop, Captain Simon could clearly identify Batman, Flash and The Green Lantern. They walked up to Captain Simon and said, “We heard you need some help building a rocket ship and we are here to help.”

“Oh thank you superheroes!” The squirrel replied.

The next day, the group met up in Captain Simon’s backyard. Batman had brought tons and tons of steel in his Batmobile. They worked with the metal all day and they did not even stop for lunch! By the end of the day they had constructed an engine, two seats and a control panel. The superheroes had each shared their
powers with the ship so it would never be destroyed, just like Captain Simon wanted. All that was left to do was paint it green and stock it full of mac `n cheese for the journey to Neptune.