Learning to be a Good Loser

Andrew's school had an Easter Bonnet Parade on Tuesday. (Oh, yes, I know that I haven't filed this post on time. Be sure to include the oversight in my annual review.) The rules clearly stated that the hat should be made by the child with minimal adult intervention.

Andrew was really excited about the competition and enthusiastically jumped into the project. I came up with the basic structure for the hat, but the rest of the creation was entirely his. We spent Monday afternoon hitting the shops in Greenwich looking for materials. We went to Pickwick Papers, where they helpfully gave us the wallpaper scraps, the stationery store for the poster board and Stars and Stripes stickers (difficult to see in the picture), and some other stores too, where we didn't find anything of use.

Once home, Andrew got to work. He cut out the most Easter-like things from the wallpaper scraps and pasted them down to the posterboard. Once we were finished, we rolled it up to make it into the hat (the trickiest bit). Andrew was thrilled with the result. He kept saying, "This one is the best! It's going to win for sure!" Silently, I agreed with him, but I hadn't seen the competition yet.

Rain prevented Andrew from wearing the hat on his walk to school, but he attracted a great deal of attention making his way over to the competition. "Wow! Look at that!", "That's bigger than Marge Simpson's hair!", "That hat makes him taller than the Juniors!", were some of things that people said. He looked great.

To make a long story short-- and you already know what happened, given the title of today's post-- Andrew didn't win. He didn't even take third place. Oh, was he sad. Nothing can be more crushing than the disappointment of a 5-year-old. He tried to be brave, but he started to cry. Frankly, given all the work he did I wanted to cry. But I kept telling him it was great and it didn't matter that he didn't win.

It's an important, but tough, lesson to learn: Not everyone can be a winner.