Jewelry Making Girl

One of String Bean’s favorite projects at school is making necklaces. They have lengths of thin cord and an endless supply of beads that she simply cannot resist. It’s gotten so bad that we’ve got maybe twenty necklaces in a huge tangled mess in the toy box now, and every time she comes home with a new one, I return it in secret the next time I drop her off at school, to be disassembled and recycled. When I pick her up, and she runs to her cubby to fetch her artwork, her sweater, and whatever other treasures are waiting in there, her teacher will warn me with a good-natured apology if there’s a necklace coming, too.

I can tell the teachers are steering her away from the necklace station now, as she’s coming home with more artwork and pipe cleaner and paper cup flowers and other creative crafts. So, she’s taken the art of necklace making home. Now, I find my nail clippers threaded through a couple of pipe cleaners which are tied together with a rubber band, which String Bean proudly hands me and asks me to wear. She loves these pipe cleaner necklaces, and can string two or three of them together, complete with charms, also made out of pipe cleaners, dangling in the center. I find these on her, her sister, the dog, the rocking horse, every stuffed animal she owns, and hanging from every doorknob in the house.

Not that I’m complaining. I like all of her creative streaks, and even if I dismantle most of her projects when she isn’t looking, I coo and fuss over them whenever she presents them to me. I like any expression of artistic ability, and want to foster that side of her, as we all know the arts are getting cut left and right in schools. I also know that some of my favorite earrings were made by my very gifted jewelry-making friends and family, so I’ve got hopes that she’ll soon be making me not just nail-clipper necklaces to wear around the house, but beautiful jewelry sets to wear out and about.

Fashionista

My 4-year-old loves to pick out my clothes, which is a lengthy process, where she has to weigh the weather, her mood, the color shirt she wants to wear, the color shirt I wore the previous day, and other random things that seem terribly important to her. This means that I race to get dressed whenever she’s not in the room, or is in my room, but temporarily distracted by rearranging toothbrushes in the toothbrush holder, or counting the various tubes of things (toothpaste, Neosporin, cortisone, etc.) in the top drawer of our sink vanity.

One thing I cannot seem to get out of, however, is letting her choose my earrings each morning. She not only likes to select which ones I’ll wear, carefully extracting pairs of earrings from my jewelry box, holding them up to me, squinting one eye as she imagines them dangling from my ears, but she likes to put them on me. If she were any other kid, I’d never allow this, but since my daughter is a ridiculously meticulous type, I never worry about her hurting me as she slides the hook through the tiny hole in my earlobe, and so far, she never has hurt me.

The other day we were getting ready for the neighbor girl’s fifth birthday party, and I’d hastily selected a pair of opal earrings when my daughter showed up and pitched a fit because she’d wanted to choose my earrings. As we were already running late, I yanked off the earrings, and held out my hand to await her careful selection. She chose these iridescent crystal squares my sister had made for me. At the birthday party, three separate times, little girls came up to me just to praise my pretty earrings. It’s not that I didn’t think she knew what she was doing. I figure she probably does have better taste than I do. Last night she said to me: “I just really like pretty things.” So maybe tomorrow I’ll splurge and let her choose my whole outfit, and see how many compliments I get then.