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.