Nailed It: A Mani & Pedi Adventure with a 3-Year-Old

Toward the end of a Friday off with my two adorable and exhausting daughters, Annabelle asked me to paint her nails. It seemed like a reasonable request. Her sister was upstairs napping and it was a perfect excuse to spend some time on the deck on a picture-perfect spring afternoon.

Then she said the five words that put the fear of God in every Dad: "Do it like Mom does."

I wasn't exactly sure what that meant in this case; I just knew that I wasn't capable of it. Still, with pink nail polish for the hands (endorsed by Anna and Elsa, of course) and blue nail polish for the feet (endorsed by Olaf), we headed outside.

"You need a paper towel," she said, just as I was about to make the first stroke.

"Right, right," I said. "Thanks." Duh.

I started with the hands. Slowly. Carefully. Delicately.

"Why are you making dots?"

"Dots?" I said, clearly on the defensive. "What do you mean? Oh, the way I do it. Well, I want to make sure I don't make a mistake. What does Mom do? Does she do, like, brushes?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I said. "Here's the thing: Mom is really good at some things and Dad is really good at some things. But sometimes we're both just ok at some things. It's kind of just the way it goes."

Not my most eloquent moment of parental wisdom, but pinkie nails on feet are really, really small and take a lot of concentration. I had finished the feet and I was feeling pretty darn good about myself. I was headed for the hands.

"Do you paint your nails, Daddy?"

"Ah, no, not really. I mean, I never have. It's not really my thing."

"Why not?"

"Boys don't really do that very much," I said, thinking about immediately about gender stereotypes. "There's nothing wrong with it if boys do it, though. It's totally fine. They just tend to do other things. Like think about some of your friends at school who are boys. What do they do? What do they like?"

"Firetrucks," she said, as I touched up the ring finger. "And firefighters. And belts."

"Belts?"

"Yeah, to keep your pants up," she said. "Different colored belts."

A bit confused, we both sort of said "Hm" and moved on to the final part of the adventure: the sparkles. I did not know about the sparkles. I soon learned it was one of the hardest parts. It was like seeing a giant hill at the end of a half marathon or a boss asking you late on Friday to squeeze in a few hours of work over the weekend.

"The sparkles, right," I said. "Which, um, which ones do you want?"

She pointed to the pink snowflakes (obviously, Frozen) and I maneuvered my much-too-large fingers into a tiny plastic carrying case, extracting one snowflake at a time until I had 10. I'm pretty sure I blacked out and then, somehow, they were all on her fingers, as I quickly captured in the photo above. (They obviously fell off 10 minutes later, but whatever.)

Annabelle looked at her fingers and toes and smiled.

"I can't wait to show Mom," she said. "I love my nails."

Me, too, kid. Me, too.