Image-conscious Alice
She is master of her own wardrobe, and she lets us know if she's cute or beautiful from one day to the next. Tearing through the mall once this fall, she suddenly stopped short opposite the sparkly pink and turquoise visual assault in the windows of pre-teen store Justice. "That store is just my style," she breathed.
"Get me with my toe pointed."
3 comments:
Raising girls seems a whole another challenge, because of the whole princess craze and the culture that values women for their appearance more than other attributes. Yet, I am pretty sure if i had a girl, I would have a really hard time discouraging this "girliness." I cannot help but admire, out loud, little girls' adorable outfits, while I have to have a long stand-off to get my boys to wear a button-down shirt to religious services (I usually give up).
The problem is that our children are very good at reading hidden cues, despite what we might try to project out loud. Alice can probably sense your ambivalence and make the most of it.
Over here, my boys are always playing battles and bad guys and turning sticks into guns. It is foreign to me, but it is fascinating too.I don't want to discourage any form of creative play, but I am never sure where the line is. Is it ok to let them "shoot" their parents with lego guns?
We're doing the same thing here. i subconsciously discouraged the princess thing for as along as I could... and now Stella is at the point where she refuses to wear jeans and after 3 1/2 years of being blissfully unaware she was wearing tons of hand-me-downs and wore whatever i picked out for her, we had to go to Target and i let her pick out three outfits she would wear because we fought so much in the mornings. she picked purples and pinks (and i abhor pink) but no more fights and she is happy too. b/c i'm at a "real" job, i also wear more jewelry now, and she's been getting into that as well - so I bought her wooden beading kit for christmas and she likes making necklaces. It's all very weird. i'll need your guidance when we get to the "so-and so has this kind of brand of clothes and i want them too" since you'll probably hit that before me. Or maybe we won't at all? I can only hope so.
oohhh the princess thing. Navigating that over here too. F will only wear clothes that are sparkly and swirly (i.e. about 3 of the skirts/dresses in her entire wardrobe). My insisting on pants or jeans underneath results in major morning arguments, which we don't have time for; I finally bought a pair of hello-kitty- adorned jeggings to help deal with that. (And like ALZ's kid, this is after years of happily wearing hand-me-downs and whatever I picked out.) That's not my "ambivalent" point, though; I mean, it is one, but the other is about her feistiness and defiance. When I found out I was pregnant with a girl I said to J. that I hoped she would be feisty. He periodically reminds me of this. I have *such* a hard time with the defiance, and partly I think it's because I do have mixed feelings about it. I want her to know what she wants and to have a mind of her own. I just also want her to do what I want her to do, and when i want her to do it (-:
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