CALDWELL, TX — The homecoming mum that Kaylee Brunson, 17, will wear to Friday night’s game against Cameron weighs eleven pounds, four ounces on the bathroom scale her mother used Wednesday morning, which is roughly a half-pound more than Kaylee weighed at birth.
The mum, assembled over six weeks at the Brunson kitchen table, contains four silk chrysanthemums the size of dinner plates, eighteen feet of trailing ribbon, two cowbells, a small battery-operated string of LED lights, a laminated photograph of Kaylee’s boyfriend Trent, a second laminated photograph of Trent’s truck, and a stuffed armadillo holding a felt football.
“We are well past the point where this is a corsage,” said Lorna Pflueger, who has run Pflueger Floral on Highway 21 since 1994 and built mums for three generations of Caldwell homecoming royalty. “What I am building now is a wearable parade float. I do not know when it changed. I know that it changed.”
Caldwell High School nurse Becky Almendariz confirmed that her office has, for the second consecutive year, pre-stocked an institutional bottle of ibuprofen, an ice pack rotation, and what she described as “the good athletic tape, not the cheap tape,” specifically in anticipation of homecoming-related neck and shoulder complaints among the junior class.
Kaylee herself, reached at the kitchen table where the mum currently occupies the entire surface and one chair, said she was excited but had been advised by her mother not to sit, lean, turn quickly, or attempt the stairs while wearing it. She added that the cowbells, in retrospect, may have been a miscalculation.
The boys are not exempt. Trent Mendoza, 17, will wear a coordinating garter on his upper arm that contains its own stuffed armadillo, three feet of ribbon, and a working LED display that spells out KAYLEE in scrolling red letters, powered by a 9-volt battery taped discreetly to the inside of his sleeve. Mendoza’s mother declined to weigh it but described it as “a lot.”
Tradition holds that the mum is presented by the boy to the girl, but Pflueger noted that the economics have inverted in recent years, with parents on both sides routinely splitting an invoice that, on her books this season, has averaged $340 and topped out at $612 for a senior whose mum required a custom shoulder harness.
Caldwell ISD has not formally addressed mum size, though athletic director Ron Kosub said in passing Tuesday that he would prefer if the LED elements did not, as occurred last year, set off the metal detector at the stadium gate and require a six-minute hand inspection of a sophomore.
Kickoff is at 7:30. Kaylee plans to remove the mum at halftime, store it carefully on the bleacher beside her, and, at her mother’s insistence, drink a full bottle of water before attempting to put it back on.