Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Independent Streak

My toddler is growing up. In reality I should probably stop calling her a toddler and start calling her a preschooler, because it has been quite a while since she's done anything close to toddle around. She runs, jumps, skips, climbs rocks, and at the moment any piece of furniture she can reach. And lately she has also taken on a bit of an independent streak.

     The most common form of this current exertion of wills is in the fashion category. She has decided to start picking out her own clothes and putting them on herself. It used to be that I could select 2 or 3 outfits and let her choose which she felt like wearing, but lately that hasn't been enough control for her. So now she runs into her closet and pulls out clothes she wants to wear, and then has to put them on all by herself.

     For the most part she is successful. Occasionally she needs help finding an arm hole or getting both legs in the right spot, but often she gets the clothes on all by herself. However, they aren't always in a manner that you or I would wear our clothes.

     It seems that a good percentage of the time that she dresses herself, the clothes are either inside-out, or backwards. With T-shirts it rarely matters whether they are front ways or backwards, although sometimes she runs around with a giant frog on her back or tags flapping in the wind and seams visible to all. With pants though, it's a bit trickier to wear them backwards.

     She has realized that jeans are much more difficult to put on oneself (especially when one is just learning how to dress oneself), so she's taken to wearing cotton pants whenever possible. And there are lots of clothing options for children out there in cotton. Some have cute designs, or even words on the backside, like "cutie." Well, you can just imagine how comical it looks to see a little 3 year old wearing "cutie" red cotton pants on backwards. 

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