Nature Will Kill You

When I went to college in Massachusetts many years ago, I took a literature class that dealt with spiritual works.  Some were actually sacred, but most were modern novels with that bent.  After we’d read something focused on the transformative power of the natural world, the professor, who was an avid hiker, went off on a lengthy tangent about people who think nature is nice.  “Nature WILL kill you!”  he shouted at the end  “You suburbanites with your manicured parks don’t get that, but it will kill you.”

That nature is deadly and fickle is something my daughter understands instinctively.  She won’t willingly enter the forest without a life preserving fight, and consequently hiking is more of a battle of wills than a time to commune with nature in any manner, spiritual or otherwise.  This is a little disappointing for me, because I love the woods myself, which is why we live in the mountains.  Sometimes we’ll go for a walk in our neighborhood and I’ll try to coax her onto the trail into the open space (“just to see what it’s like”), but she never gets more than a few feet down the path. We have more luck if we actually drive the few miles to the national forest, but that’s because she likes the stream in the picnic area.  We still never get further than the spot where the stream diverges from the trail.

Now, every year Rose’s school chooses a theme to work into several interrelated projects.  Last year, Rose’s first year, it was nature and conservancy.  The students were supposed to learn to be “good keepers of the Earth”.  Rose’s immediate reaction was that she’d stay inside all year to avoid having adverse impact on the natural world.   When I insisted that we actually take the assigned nature walks she complied, but only grudgingly.  Well, she complied until she found out about the mountain lion sightings in our neighborhood.  After that even playing in the backyard was right out.  Which is how she ended up designing a large mountain lion deterring statue for our yard as her first school project:

The Ghost Horse

This year the issue is not mountain lions, but coyotes.  To anyone that does not live in a wilderness area with packs of wild coyotes this might not seem to be much of a threat.  However, a motivated pack of these small, dirt colored canines can bring down a horse (I know because a friend lost her horse in this manner) and would find small children a tasty snack.  (As a friend of mines likes say when city folk are showing their kids to the pacing mountain lions at the zoo, “Mmmm, they smell just like cupcakes.”)  Since an aggressive pack has recently set up shop in the open space bordering our neighborhood I have to find a gentle way to keep my daughter aware, without keeping her in house all fall.  I have a feeling it’s going to be another indoors kind of season.

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Birthday Cake

Rose is 7!  Her Birthday was on Friday and we spent the last 2 days celebrating.  Friday she got her new bike, and Saturday we all went to the local amusement park and had some dinner on the way home.  She really wanted to have a big party, but I wanted to do something with her that she’d actually enjoy at the time, rather than only in the anticipatory stages.  I think we succeeded, although it took some convincing.  She had her heart set on a party just like the virtual kind she throws in Pixie-Hollow (Disney social networking for tots), for all her digital pixie friends.  In the end the only sticking point was the cake, and once I agreed that she could still have a 3- tier, pink frosted cake, with lots of decorations, she agreed to a change of plan.

The problem, of course, was me.  I can’t bake.  I can cook, and love to make food of all kinds, but I just can’t seem to make a proper cake to save my life.  When Rose turned 4 we had a party with one of those big jumpy things in the yard, a barbeque and lots of adult friends with kids. Pixie-girl was a little obsessed with pirates at the time, so we dressed up and made everyone wear eye patches and played pirate music.  I had a lovely cake planned, that should have looked like a pirate treasure map with a dense coating of sprinkles along the sides.  I had it all planned and had read a whole book on cake decorating in preparation.  When the time came to frost the cake, it just sort of crumbled.  I couldn’t get the icing on the cake without the cake falling apart.  The more icing I used the worse it got. In a panic I put the whole mess in the freezer for an hour, then molded it back into a mostly cake shaped form.  I then tossed a bunch of sprinkles and colored sugar all over it, but that didn’t make it look any better.  In the end I told the guests that it was a theme cake:  Pirates made it on their pirate ship.

This year we had a similar experience.  I had to bake 4 round cakes from 2 boxes of cake mix to get enough layers.  This required 2 trips to the grocery store and about 4 hours of work.  Don’t ask me how.  Once the cakes were cool I cut them into 3 different size circles and put all the cake in the refrigerator while I made the icing, from a recipe I found on the Food Network site for a 3 tier, pink frosted cake (who knew?).  It was all going better than expected at that point.  When the time came I carefully frosted the bottom two layers and was feeling really optimistic.  Then, I stacked the last two, small cakes, with a little chocolate icing left over from a brownie related disaster the week before.  That was dicey and I ended up just sort of laying bits of chocolate icing around the top of one of the cakes.   However, when I started with the pink butter cream things went downhill rapidly.   Let me just say it was a repeat of the pirate cake debacle.  After I got it out of the freezer, I had to give up and remove most of one of the small cakes and smash some pink icing right onto the hardened chocolate icing before molding it into something vaguely cylindrical.

It gets worse.  I didn’t realize that the buttercream needed to be refrigerated before I tried to use it to decorate.  We darkened it up with more food dye and put it in a pastry bag, thinking we could figure out how to make those little scallop shapes that bakeries put around the bottom of cakes.  Nope.  Just globs of melty icing.  By the time I finished the make-shift heart on top of the cake I was close to tears, because I thought I’d ruined Rose’s birthday.  But you know what she said to me?  “I love it, because I know how hard you worked on it.  You don’t have to be perfect all the time.”  And then I did cry, because having Rose say that to me was about the best thing that’s happened to me this year.

Pixie Cake

Happy Birthday Rose!!!!!

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Best Friend and Tie Shoes

Yesterday I picked Miss Rose up from school to find she has a best friend!  This is her first (flesh and blood) best friend ever, and I’m curious to find out more about the entire situation.  In the past there have been forays into friend-ville, but it’s never really worked out.  It was generally the case that Rose had expectations that were not shared by the other parties.  I’d let my child have her initial excitement, but  after awhile I had to face the fact that the other parents were not going to call me back to arrange that play date.  This time Rose was given a phone number and email address before I even knew the best friend existed.   I am cautiously optimist for the immediate future.

There is a minor down side, though.  Costuming.  Costuming is always a problem in our world.  Last year she got fixated on dresses:  big, frothy, sparkly dresses.   This year, it looks like she wants to wear jeans and tie shoes and hats and t-shirts, suggesting that the new best friend has a more casual fashion aesthetic.  I wonder how this will affect her dreams of being the fashion designer of Pixie Hollow?  And, having been through the Great Jeans Crisis of ’07-’08 (wherein I bought about 15 pairs of jeans over the course of kindergarten year that she would not wear for a variety of reasons) I’m pretty skeptical about the jeans in general.  However, this might be a good motivator to get Rose to learn to tie her shoes. Despite many hours of trying she has not mastered the shoe tying art.

All I can say, at the moment, is that I’m glad I decided against major clothes shopping until colder weather.

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The Diagnostic Two Step

About a year and a half ago I went to my doctor because I had hives all over my body.  I wasn’t sleeping well due to all of the itching, and the masses of welts were starting to alarm me or I never would have bothered.  They make OTC anti-histimines for a reason.  After a non-exam my doctor pronounced me a victim of stress and recommended yoga (it was dermographism, but I’d have to wait another 6 months to find that out) . Miss Rose was present and acting very Rose-like, so as we were leaving the office the doctor tugged me back and asked quietly, “What is her diagnosis?”  I gave her the medical, endocrine system related diagnosis, but the doctor just cocked her head and said “No, the other one.” (To be fair to the doctor, she just wanted to recommend a caregiver’s support group.)

I didn’t know what to say to that back then, and I don’t have a better answer now.  There’s not an easy word that sums it all up.  My daughter’s diagnosis, right now, is something like ADHD and anxiety disorder-NOS and sensory integration dysfunction and social delays and slow information processing speed and whatever else was in the latest report.  I forget from day to day.  She’s also likely gifted, but won’t answer questions she’s not positive about, so the IQ test results are difficult to interpret.  She scores high enough on some index or other to be diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome, but the diagnostic professionals don’t want to use that term yet (Yet!).  I’m on board with that, and so it my husband.  A diagnosis isn’t a child, right?  They have to treat the person, not the medical term.  Well, unless you’re a school district that is.

I was pulled aside by my daughter’s occupational therapist to talk about diagnosis today. It seems that the OT must re-evaluate Rose very soon under the criterion for developmental motor delay.  Rose won’t qualify, and for good reason.  She doesn’t have a motor delay.  That’s not why she should be seeing the OT.  Oh, my pixie child had some low tone in her trunk and fine motor issues in preschool (and gross motor issues that got her banned from the playground equipment, but that’s another issue), but the ongoing OT services were supposed address sensory integration and behavioral regulation.  It turns out that Rose can’t get the services we all think she should have unless she goes through the Autism Service.  It also turns out that most of the school professionals think that my husband and I are in denial and Rose has Asperger’s Syndrome.  Luckily I can fix everything by agreeing to let the school district set aside our private evaluation and have them test her for an ASD.

Why does the thought leave a sick feeling deep in my abdomen?  I know I’m cynical and distrustful of human nature.  It’s just my thing.  I also understand that no one makes a career of being a public school therapist for the love of money, glory and power.  The OT is clearly trying to help, but something just feels off.  Why is this so *&$%# hard?  Seriously?  My child needs help and I’m tired of arguing with people about whose job it is to provide it, and how to file the paperwork.  Saints and Seraphim on a whole wheat wafer!  I just spent 4 hours teaching my child everything she should have learned at school today.  I’m too exhausted to fight with anyone about the semantics of disability.

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Speaking with Commas.

I had the following discussion with my husband this morning:

Me:  “When we were at school yesterday W.P. got to play with another two year old, also born in June, and they got wet in the fish pond.”

Husband:  “How could the other child be 2 if he was born in June?”

Me:  “His birthday is in June, just like W.P.  He was born in June in 2007.”

Husband:  “That’s not what you said.”

Me:  “Yes it is.  I use commas when I speak.”

Husband:  “Please stop doing that. Well, then what happened?”

Me:  “I don’t even remember what we were talking about.”

This is not an unusual conversation in my house.  Both Rose and her father are very literal, and not overly responsive to subtle clues about meaning.  Tonal inflections, and many facial expressions, are imperfectly understood foreign langauge components for the two of them.  It isn’t so much that they don’t understand at all, but that they need to translate so many things in order to process conversation that it ends up garbled.  And I tend to end up frustrated.

I try to help them out, especially Rose.  I’ve learned to be careful about how I use pronouns, for example.  After years of misunderstandings I’ve learned I cannot say “W.P. and I met Mr. Jones at the library, and he told us there’s a fair at the park next weekend.”  That could very likely be followed by the question, “How did W.P. know that there’s a fair at the park next weekend?”  This could come from either of them,  but Rose would be giggling while she asked.  I’ve been less successful curbing my tendency to employ sarcasm.  It is met with blank stares, and occasional odd explanations from my husband, but it’s been a hard thing for me to learn to stop.  Sarcasm becomes a deep personality trait after awhile.

After I finished up my coffee and woke Rose I decided to try out my sentence on her.  I figured my husband could be putting me on.

Me:  “Rose!  Guess what?  When we were at school yesterday W.P. got to play with another two year old, also born in June, and they got wet in the fish pond.  That’s kind of neat.  W.P. has a friend his age.”

Rose:  (giggling) “Mom!  W.P. isn’t the same age as a boy born in June.  You’re silly.”

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Carts Are for Shopping

There are many products on the market that, while designed for use by small children, were clearly designed by people who don’t have any children themselves.  I believe the car shaped shopping cart is one such product.  No parent that regularly shops with little people would have approved that final design.  In my most cynical moments I imagine the design meeting went something like:

Design Pro 1:  “Hey!  If only we can make a  cart  that’s bigger, and heavier and harder to steer. “

Design Pro 2:  “I know! I know!  We’ll add a child compartment as far from the supervising adult as possible, and put a roof on it, so said parent can’t see what the child is doing with that bag of marshmallows they’re going to snag off the bottom shelf.”

Design Pro 1:  “Oh!  And make it look like a car, because kids love to pretend to drive and they won’t be able to resist screaming  and begging and whining to get in it.  And then we’ll make it really expensive so the stores can only buy one or two, thereby guaranteeing screaming meltdowns on a semi-regular basis.”

Design Pro 2:  “Yes!  The parents are going to love this.”

Design Pro 1:  “Not to mention the other shoppers, and the employees that have to round up the carts.”

This comes to mind, of course, because there was an incident.  In my experience, grocery stores are the number one place for child related incidents.  They are crowded, noisy and smelly.  They hit all my daughter’s sensory buttons at once, and yet they are essentially boring.  No one is getting a new princess crown.   To combat the semi-regular grocery store incidents we do all the normal stuff.  I prepare her by giving her the basic line-up of activities and expectations.  I bribe (um, reward) and threaten (enunciate consequences), and let her ride in the back of the cart and read a book, until the cart is too full.  As long as we arrive when she’s not already exhausted, or upset about something, this works fine.  That is unless the car cart enters the picture.

Two weeks ago we arrived at the store after a day at the pool and I intended to buy a gallon of milk and some random thing I needed to make dinner.  No need for any kind of cart, but Rose wanted the car cart badly; a situation I had not anticipated.  Someone else had the car cart, but were leaving.  When I refused to stalk the other family through the parking lot to get the cart when they were done, her breakdown was mighty.  Seriously, it was bad.  I think the police were called before I coaxed her to the car, because a deputy’s SUV kept circling behind us.   I had completely inappropriate fantasies of destroying the lone remaining car cart in dramatic ways.

Yesterday’s incident was much more mundane.  We  arrived at the store to find the car cart sitting in a cart coral 3 spaces away.  I didn’t see it, but both of my children did.  Before I could formulate a reason not to use it they were both so excited about getting it that I no choice.  (Well, I had a choice, but it was go home with no groceries and no wine, or use the cart.)  I let them both squeeze into the car compartment, while listening to another child, just a little further off, start to cry because his mom hadn’t parked fast enough for him to be car cart shopping.  It made me feel badly, because I knew in my bones the car cart was just going to be a fiasco for us anyway.  Sure enough, before I’d made it to produce my daughter was screaming about pulled hair and my son was screaming because he was strapped in.  By the time we’d hit the meat department Rose was forced out of the cart all together with threats of dire consequences, and less than 3 minutes later W.P. was howling because Rose was hanging on his mommy and he was still strapped up front all alone with no one’s hair to pull.  At that point I gave up and found the first regular cart I could snag and switched all my stuff over.  That resulted int the 2 year old yelling and crying “CAR” for the next 20 minutes, while the 7 year old leaped and twirled and touched everything on all the shelves, and I tried to read my list and find enough stuff to keep us out of the store for a few days.

Still, I count the day as a success. There was no evidence of police interest and I seem to have remembered most of the important stuff on the list.  At least I have the wine, and no one was permanently injured.

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Creative Lunchbox Fare. Ha!

Unlike potty training, I really do like back to school time, and not because I’m losing a child for a few hours every day.  (I really miss Pixie Girl when she’s at school, even if she doesn’t believe me)  Sure, it’s not all that easy around here, but I’ve always loved that fresh start feeling of a new year school year.  Besides, I get to buy school supplies.  School supplies are cool, and I love buying them.  There is nothing like opening a never-wrote-in notebook for the first time and it’s the only time of year I can find a sharp pencil any time I want one.  I even enjoy shopping for clothing with Rose, as long as W.P. hangs out with Dad for the afternoon.  Mostly I love reading all the articles on how to get the year off to a good start, and dreaming that I’ll use the tips effectively.  The food ones are the best.

I’ve always been something of a foodie. My father and I spent most weekend mornings watching cooking shows on PBS (Julia Child and The Frugal Gourmet were the best) and planning which recipes we’d try to duplicate. This was before one could grab the recipe off the web when the show was over, so I took notes.  I suspect I’m a little ADD myself, so our version was never quite right, but oh well.  It was fun and we learned a lot.  Now, I’m addicted to Food Network and their website and cookbooks and cooking magazines.  There is nothing I like better than a cold day with a stack of cookbooks from library.   Too bad I can’t cook any of it.  Neither my husband, nor my daughter appreciate my experiments, and I don’t eat all that much anymore.  I must content myself with fantasies of food.

I was thinking about this today, because I ran across a list of “Easy and Creative Lunch Recipes” on the Food Network site (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes-and-cooking/easy-and-creative-lunch-recipes-for-kids/index.html).  It has great ideas that I’d love to try, but alas they would be uneaten.  Rose is not a daring eater, and does not appreciate creativity in her lunch box.  She likes tuna with capers, Peter Pan Peanut butter, dried apricots, apples, pears, cheese sticks (but only the white kind!) and Wheat Thin crackers in her lunch box.  Sometimes she’ll want dinner leftovers in her thermos, but they rarely get eaten.  She will eat some set of these things everyday, all year and never get bored.  One time I got fancy and cut the apple up and sent her peanut butter mixed with yogurt and honey for dipping.  The poor child was still weepy when I picked her up from school.

I guess I should feel lucky.  I don’t have to be fancy about lunch time, and she’s not stuck on cold chicken nuggets like one friend’s child.  Her choices are healthy and simple to prepare, so I know I’m being ridiculous.  Still, part of me wants to make the fancy wraps and rolls and homemade granola bars and whatnot. Maybe W.P. and I will give them a try.  Picnics are still doable for a couple more months, and my lunch time fixation should be past by then.  And like the Life cereal kid (Mikey, wasn’t it?  The one that didn’t die of an overdose of Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola) W.P. will try anything.

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Who Knows from Normal?

When my daughter was still an infant her doctor told us that we had to let ourselves worry less about what was normal.   She confided that her own child had suffered through neurological difficulties at birth, and so she knew how hard it could be to move on to the stage where we could see a healthy, normal child.  Everything, she told us, would seem like a warning of impending disaster from then on, unless we worked hard to put our anxiety aside.  We tried to take that advice to heart and to interact with our child as though everything she did was just as it should be.

That’s harder than it sounds, and has gotten harder over the years.  The first time we saw our baby break down in convulsions and knew, in our hearts, that something was broken, everything changed. Then, when we learned that all that sleeping, and staring wasn’t normal, the fear set up camp in my chest.  And when we were told that all that cute floppiness wasn’t cuddling and the round chubbiness wasn’t a testament to the goodness of my milk, we realized our ignorance of “normal” could have killed our beautiful little girl, and the fear made a home right against my left ventricle. I can’t ever swallow without feeling it’s lump again.

By the time Rose was approaching 3, despite all our attempts at optimism, we knew there were other not quite normal things going on.  Since they were not things that would kill her we tried to wait it out, and accepted familial reassurances.  At her 3 year check up my husband and I both went so we could hear first hand what the pediatrician had to say.  I’d already read “Quirky Kids” and a bunch of articles about signs of high functioning autism in preschool aged kids.  My husband thought I was overreacting and wanted his voice heard.  During the appointment the doctor listened to us and watched our daughter play, and made soothing sounds about the range of “normal” behaviors in children.  We were feeling soothed and silly when Pixie Girl took a stack of post-it notes from my purse and started to carefully peal and stick them to a wall in an evolving pattern of lines and squares. The pediatrician asked if that was “normal” behavior for Rose, and a couple of other questions, before writing a referral for a developmental pediatrician at the university.  Within 2 months our lovely daughter had a diagnosis of pdd-nos and we had a new, more PC, word for “normal”; neuro-typical.

We like to think that good things came from that diagnosis, and that Rose’s life is better, and will continue be better, because of the interventions and therapies.  That is not to say that intervening came without cost.  There have been too many tests and too many professionals.  Not all of those professionals realized how smart she was, and consequently too many things have been said in her presence that I’d rather Rose didn’t hear.  My princess has labels that don’t fit and more that do, but some not well enough, and people remember.  I’ve lost friends because they could not keep from referring to my “handicapped” child in front of their children, and could not treat her like a person.  I have family that will never really know my brilliant daughter, because she is just a pitiable word to them.

We have also been pushed to see her gifts through the lens of “functionality”.  All unique behaviors must be scrutinized to determine if they are functional.  Imaginary twins are not fantasy and a sign of a good imagination, but a sign of a “non-functional coping strategy”.  Her tendency to act out characters from books, her alternate realities, her brilliant stories are all something verging on sinister in this new world.  I’d rather just celebrate her vision and let her be a child.  There are things I don’t have the stomach to fix.  To help her be a happy adult, do I really need to rob her of imagination?  At least that’s how if feels sometimes.

Now we have a son too.  So far I’ve been good at believing in his neurotypical-ness and not borrowing trouble (as my mother says).  He is very different than his sister.  Where her language was sometimes bizarrely precocious, W.P., is just ever so slightly lagging his peers.  Rose was always a big girl, not overweight (at least after her medical condition was stabilized), just tall and strong, but her brother is tiny, hanging out in the 5th percentile range for height and weight (but with a head circumference in the 90th percentile.  Thoughts of “So, I Married an Axe Murderer” come to me sometimes).  W.P., walks around with one fist closed and held close to his body much of the time, and Rose’s OT tells me he has low body tone.  None of this seems to concern his pediatrician, so I try to accept it as his state of normal and move on.

Still, there are days when I wonder what I’m missing and if my ignorance is costing him anything.  At the same time I don’t want to put him through what Rose endured without a very solid reason.  I feel caught between a desire to protect both of my children from unnecessary complications, from the exclusion from normality, and still wanting to save them from whatever I’m not seeing.  I want to let them be children now, and delight in their games and imaginary universes, but want them to grow into confident, competent adults. There are days when it seems like we are walking a thin and blurring line.

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The First 4 Hours.

The school year is officially 4 hours old!  After a couple of weeks of stress related tantrums and fits of rage the first day is past and we have a whole weekend to recover.   There isn’t even homework, because there was some sort of get-back-in-the-swing presentation going on today.  Still, there was weirdness.  There’s always weirdness.

~Girl Child is now under the impression that those drinking bird toys predated life on earth and are responsible for the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere.  (“There wasn’t anything alive, because nothing could breath, but you know what happened?  Drinking birds!  I know, I know.  They’re just toys.  But wow!  They made all that oxygen and now there are plants and dogs and manatees and things.”)  I cannot fathom what lesson this could have been misconstrued from.

~She wants to be a Girl Scout.  Girl Scouts apparently get to tell countries what to do about climate change and resource management.  And manatees.

~The occupational therapist called a left a lengthy message stating that pixie-girl would not qualify for services this year, even if she had time to do the reevaluation, which she doesn’t.   Oh!  And she needs to know tonight when I want Rose to get the services she’s too overloaded to provide.  This is the same OT that missed half of the scheduled sessions and then declared our daughter cured when we complained.  The IEP process should be even more fun that I’d expected.

~By all accounts Pixie Child had a good day at school.  However, she reports that her twin sister (of the imaginary variety) had a meltdown over not being the line leader when it was Rose’s turn.  This twin is usually quiet and smart, and feeds her sister answers during quizzes, and reminds her not to hold hands too hard.  Well, at school she’s good.  At home they tend to have big fights that get them separated.  In fact they aren’t allowed to sleep in the same room anymore.  I may have to check into this behavior problem, though.   I may have to put them in different classes if this continues.  Or I may just need to medicate myself.

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It’s, like, 1983. Gag me.

In an attempt to get the pixie-child into some clothing more appropriate for school, I took her to the mall.  She likes the mall, but only if she’s getting something beautiful and it’s relatively empty.  It is cool and dimly lit, and smells like perfume and comfort foods.  Loud noises are rare, outside of Christmas shopping time, and it is filled with lovely things to look at and touch and pick up and try on.  The only draw back is the crush of people, but in this recession they are largely missing.  What’s not to like?  Too bad momma hates the place, but there’s always the book store to console me at the end.

We entered at our usual place and I firmly refused to go into the store packed with goods from exotic places, and clothing mostly made of gauzy, sequin covered fabric (even though “that would be perfect with [her] fairy wings”).  Instead I steered Rose into a major retailer known for tasteful (if stupidly expensive) children’s clothing.  What I found there both horrified me and made me think more fondly of princess dresses.  Standing right in front of me, in the middle of an upscale retail outlet, was a salesperson looking like a mid-80′s Madonna wanna-be.  Since it’s not October and Madonna is not in town for a concert, I had to accept this might be a fashion statement.  Ironic fashion statement?  Nope, apparently not.  Designers and retailers have decided to rehash 1983.

Why, I ask you?  I will grant that some of my distaste for the clothing is that I wore it during a very uncomfortable time in my life.  I was just starting high school in a new town, my parents’ weren’t even pretending to get along, and my dad and I were openly at war over pretty much nothing, pretty much all the time.  Yet even trying my hardest to put that aside, I can’t see how the clothing of the time was attractive.  Neon is not a good color scheme for most people, and those short flippy skirts only look good on preschool girls, and people shaped like them.  Those shirts that fall off one shoulder are annoying to wear, even if they looked good (which they don’t), and the potato sack shaped dresses have always made me shake my head in confusion.  And leg warmers.  Really?  Do we need to even go into leg warmers?

I’d like to say this was one lone fashion crusader, but it wasn’t.  All afternoon I caught glimpses of perms and neon animal prints and ankle boots and big belts and peacock colored eyeshadow.  There was even on teenager with an armload of rubber neon bracelets, although they were all of the “supporting a cause” variety.  It seems the powers that be are determined to do the 80′s again this year.  There’s even a remake of “Red Dawn” in production.  (Yay!  Let’s have another Cold War!  The first one was so much fun, and I thought my kids would miss out.  I’m so glad they won’t have to make do with just a War on Terror.)

I’ve seen the fashion designer shows (“Project Runway” and that other one with Isaac Mizrahi), so I know there are schools dumping out tons of aspiring clothing artistes every year.  You can’t tell me that all of them are incapable of an original thought.  It must have occured to one of them that this stuff sucked the first time around.  And while we’re at it, it must have crossed someone’s mind that little girls don’t need to look like sex kittens in grade school.  I’m not looking for ankle length, body concealing, modesty gear. I just want something cute that covers everything and is easy to play in.  Maybe something with no words suggesting my daughter was looking to play something more than Legos with your son would be nice too.

In the end we went with a combination of toned down dresses and skorts and t-shirts from Land’s End.  We only bought a few things, because she’s developing an interest in biking and rock climbing (which I whole-heartedly endors!).  If  her interest in those things continue, and her pattern of adopting new obsessions continues, we’ll end up replacing all the girly stuff with sports’ wear sometime in the late fall anyway.  I just hope she doesn’t pick up an interest in hair bands from the 80′s.

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