Lately, no matter what we're doing, Annabelle needs to wear a dress.
Going grocery shopping? Dress. Going to the playground? Dress. Going out back to splash around in the pool? Dress? Taking a tub? You guessed it.
Okay, so that last one is an exaggeration, but not by much. For the past several weeks, Annabelle, my "this T-shirt and shorts are fine, Dad" girl, wants nothing to do with any article of clothing unless it's a dress.
This is challenging for me. Why? Mostly because dresses are not practical, at all. It's like driving a minivan around a city.
Like a lot of males (not to generalize, but I'm going to do just that), my feelings on outfits are as follows: Wake up, wear something, stay in said something until something dictates a change (playing a sport, going out for a nice dinner, going to bed, etc.). That's about it. I would never just change in the middle of the day -- especially not if I were wearing a perfectly good, weather-appropriate outfit. Why not? Because I'm not insane.
Annabelle, on the other hand, revels in such insanity. Take the 60-second video below, for example. Somehow, by some miracle, we coaxed Annabelle into wearing a T-shirt and pants because it's fall and it's no longer 80 degrees outside. Then, less than an hour later, this happened:
See what I'm dealing with? How do you reason with her? I'll give you three chances to guess what she was wearing soon after I hit the "stop" button on the camera.
The other problem with this whole "wearing dresses all the time" thing is laundry. Only a few dresses will work, as you know if you have children. Annabelle has 20 dresses, but 17 of them are "ugly" or "not cute" or "too stripy." (I'm fairly certain that last one isn't even a word.) That means we wash three dresses constantly. And, if we do an outfit change like in the video above, we have twice the amount of laundry.
The whole situation, as you can see, is wildly out of hand. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears. Yell loudly, though. The washing machine is loud.
Try to find a way to turn this behavior into a teachable moment!
ReplyDeleteSo for instance the best example I can come up with momentarily: If you have twice as much laundry, then you use more water. We should save water for the trees to grow, for you to brush your teeth, when AB is thirsty, and on and on... Maybe she'll end up being environmentally conscious instead of wasting time to change. :)
Enjoy these moments... someday she'll be a teenager and try to walk out the door "half-dressed"
ReplyDelete"Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory."~ Anonymous