Me and My Shadow

Hand shadow puppets that go beyond the bird and bunny ears!

It’s expected in our area (Tandang Sora reprezent!!) that when a heavy downpour comes, Meralco will shut off electricity for a few hours. For some strange reason a transformer at one of the posts along our street is prone to overloading. It always goes off with a loud bang followed by a “kaput” coming from all the houses in our subdivision.

With a little bugoy in the house I have to think of ways to keep DW entertained while we’re in the dark and with no electricity, the only thing I’ve thought of so far is making shadow puppets.

DW loves looking at shadows but I didn’t realize at first that he was looking at them. DW would just stare into space and then he  would laugh and giggle. Being the rational person that I am, the only thing I thought of was that yes, my son was seeing ghosts and then I promptly scared myself because images of Sadako suddenly entered my consciousness. Labo.

Anyway, before I freaked out and called the local mangtatawas, I realized that DW was looking at shadows. A big sigh of relief for me but I soon found out that I can only do one shadow puppet, the bird. Even DW was not impressed.

at least this was a better effort than the bunny ears I’ve been doing on top of DW’s head. Even he knew that was lame.

So I searched online for a site that had easy hand shadow puppets to try and found www.shadow-puppets.com.

It’s an awesome site with the illustrations scanned from a book that was published in 1859! (See them after the jump)

You have your animals…

elephant lang naman and a bear (in the book it was called a bruin)

and of course people, yes people! actually faces of people in side view

creepy, yes? wait, it only gets better! the puppet at the left is called “fright” kamusta naman?

There are more puppets at the site though and I’d want to try at least some of them.  Then maybe when DW gets older, I’ll try the faces. I’d probably end up scaring myself more than DW though. Silly mommy.