Another Reject from the Gender-Neutral Pile

This is another outfit--some pajamas--that J pulled out of R's old 12-18 month clothing bin and marked as "gender neutral." Um. What do you think?

Hand-me-downs

J finally pulled out a bin of R's 12-18 month old clothes, thank goodness, because we found quite a few things we can pass down to RUS. Although, in a few cases, I thought J exercised some questionable judgment.

Of the following items, which would you say are appropriately gender-neutral? Would you dress RUS in them?

Growing!

We have officially moved RUS out of his newborn-size clothing! He still fits into some of it, but it's tight, and the 3-month stuff is only a little big.

Camel Shirt

Remember the camel shirt I talked about in this post?

This is the shirt. My friend H sent it from Dubai, and it is one of R's favorites. It's just taken me awhile to remember to get a picture of it when she's wearing it.

Toddler Fashion

The other day, R insisted on accessorizing her outfit herself. She's wearing a belt made from a lion headband, a cape made from a sleeper, a Michael Jackson-esque sock glove, and a new hat J and I bought for her at a tag sale. She was so proud of her outfit that when I asked if she wanted me to take some pictures, she was more than happy to pose and show it off.

Camel

R is starting to get more choosy about what she wears. Today when she was getting dressed, I broke out a shirt we got from my friend H shortly after R was born with a big pink camel on it and a cute pink top that she hasn't worn yet and asked R which shirt she wanted to wear. She went right for the camel, and was pretty excited about the shirt all day long. She kept saying camel, and pointing at her shirt. So excited!

When she got home from day care the shirt had some remnants of her lunch on it and then she fed herself a bowl of yogurt and bananas and made even more of a mess. By this point she really needed a new shirt.

But when we got upstairs she really did not want to take off the camel shirt. I have never experienced so much resistance at getting her undressed. She held on to that shirt for dear life, despite the fact that it had puddles of yogurt on it. I tried to entice her with all her other shirts.

Look, this one has a turtle! Oooh, what about this squirrel? Or, oh my GOODness, look at the leopard print!

Nothing deterred her. She WANTED that camel shirt, and she wanted to be wearing it.

Fortunately, I am bigger and stronger, so I won the battle of getting the shirt off. That didn't mean she wasn't really pissed off about it for, oh, 5 minutes. Then she wanted the leopard print shirt and was really happy afterwards.

Good grief.

Then I had to change her pants. This one was a little easier, as she got excited about her cat pajama pants right away.

I am pretty interested to see how her sense of style continues to develop. And sorry, no pictures of the camel shirt-- we'll try to catch some next time. It's a sweet shirt.

Nordic Princess

Grandma and Grandpa brought this new outfit for R when they visited two weekends ago. I love it. I think it makes her look like a Nordic Princess.

And, to make it even better, Grandma found it at the Goodwill. I wish our Goodwill here was as awesome as the one right by my parents' house. Theirs is really big and always seems to have a good selection of stuff.

Hand-Made Outfit from Great-Aunt L and Great-Grammie

Here are the pictures from when R wore her new outfit from Great Aunt L and Great-Grammie the other day. Everyone at day care loved it! And it's perfectly warm and cozy for the wintry weather we've been having!

Roar!

I've been working on teaching R how to roar--like a lion or a bear. She can sign both lion and bear, and gets very excited when she sees pictures of either animal. She doesn't always roar, though. This bear suit might help her learn, don't you think? Thanks so much, Jenn, for the bear suit! Her daughter, whose name is the same as R's, and who is almost exactly one year older than R, was kind enough to let us have the clothes she's outgrown. This bear suit was one of the things in the recent care package Jenn sent. We love it. She wore it two days in a row just because we didn't want to stop watching her waddle around like the adorablest little bear.

Halloween Antics Part II

After returning inside, R was ready to put on her full cat costume - which consisted of adding the ears and tail.
The tail is pretty fun to play with - and it loops onto her belt loop which prevents her from removing it - a feature the ears do not have, unfortunately.
A little bit of costume wearing goes a long way.

Halloween Antics Part I

Halloween morning, R got dressed for daycare. She wore an orange pair of pants with candy corn on them, a black halloween shirt, and practiced wearing her cat ears for later. They would be playing dress-up at day care so she was not in costume when she first left the house. She took a moment here to study up on her numbers before going to school.

At daycare they had special snacks and got dressed up and went for a walk outside, crunching along on the fallen leaves. R took her nap in her costume and so when it was time to go home, she put on her orange pants to keep her legs warm. It was such a nice day that R decided to play outside for a bit. With her leopard print outfit, she decided to pretend she was a cave-person. She found some nice looking sticks to rub together.

Japanese socks

My friend M picked up these socks for R when she went to Japan for Christmas last year to stay with her husband's family. They were way too big for R's feet for a long time but lately they've been fitting really well! Here she is modelling them. When she has these particular socks on, she's always pointing out the toe straps on the socks. Aren't they cute???

You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the girl

As I mentioned in my last post, R has really been into wearing socks. She's also been really into wearing her cowboy boots. She picks them up from the shelf, walks over to you, proceeds to hand them over, and lifts up her foot.

She has so much fun clomping all around the house with them on-- making lots of noise on our hardwood floors.

When she does it, it really looks like she's trying to join a hoe-down, and is ready to line-dance with the best of them.

Socks

Guess what? R loves socks. She will find socks while you're folding laundry and ask you to put them on her. She finds my socks and J's socks and will ask us to put them on her, even though they're way too big. I usually put them on her hands instead of her feet to avoid tripping. Oh man, she loves it. And if you dare to pull those socks off of her, or take them away, does she get mad.

When we pull out her socks to put them on in the morning, she starts lifting up her feet in anticipation.

The other day she was hanging out at home with J, and she really wanted to wear more than one pair of socks at the same time. J was happy to oblige, giving her the layered sock look that went out in the 1980s, as well as some thumbless mittens.Last month, she got some Dora the Explorer socks from Auntie T (thanks!!) and this morning when I put them on her she said hi to Dora. So cute.

Weekend Update

R seems to be 90% better from her cold/respiratory infection. This is indeed cause for celebration. She slept a lot today, and had her fair share of crankiness, but her nose is not running and she has not had a fever since Thursday evening.

We've had a busy weekend, with a picnic on Saturday and running around town getting some shopping done today.

The funny thing is, though, that we've been getting up so early that when we left to go to the store, we were sure everything would already be open. In fact, though, it was only 9:00-- and nothing on Sunday is open at 9, really. It just felt later than that because we'd been up since 4:30 with R (well, actually, J let me go back to sleep until about 6:30) and it just seemed like it was late morning.

So we drove out to the mall where the Carter's store was (I wanted to get some long-sleeved onesies and some warm sleepwear for R, now that the nights are getting chillier) and it was only 9:30 and the store didn't open until 11! Because we were half an hour from home, we didn't want to waste the entire trip so we just killed some time by going to Office Depot when they opened at 10 to get a few things I needed for work and then browsing the grocery store that was right next to Carter's.

Brushing Hair (and some Androgyny)

Ok, so, I've posted before about how we did not find out ahead of time whether we were having a boy or a girl. This resulted in us getting a lot of gender-neutral stuff, including gender-neutral clothes. We also got a bunch of clothes that, at the time, I thought were borderline gender-neutral. Turns out they're really not.

In this video, you see R having a grand time brushing her doll's hair. She will do this if you say to her, "R, go brush your doll's hair!" She seeks out the brush, the doll, and proceeds to brush the doll's hair by generally hitting the doll in the head with the brush. (This is also how she brushes my hair. Yes, we're working on it!)

Anyway, in this video you also see her wearing a t-shirt that I initially deemed to be gender-neutral out of the piles of clothes my aunt sent us before she was born, and thus I kept it even after we found out she was a girl. When J put her in it the other day, I realized that it's really not so much gender-neutral.

Wearing it makes R look incredibly boyish. I think this speaks to the general androgyny of little kids, and also to one of the dangers of gender-neutral clothes. Technically, girls wear lots of red too. But girl shirts have to have some kind of froo-froo addition: a gathered sleeve or some lacy bits on the collar or a ruffle somewhere or a bow on the end of the sleeve or on the center of the neckline or something.

Back to School

It's starting to feel like fall. It's still pretty warm and muggy in the middle of the day, but the mornings have been crisp and cool. Some individual leaves have started to fall and it really won't be long before everything is red and yellow and orange and brown. I can't wait. After three years of everything's-green-until-it's-brown falls in Texas, I'm ready for what I consider to be "real" fall weather.

And of course, fall is back-to-school time. While R technically went back to school a couple of weeks ago, she got some new back-to-school clothes from Grandma and Aunt M just last week. And they are perfect! I love them!

Here are a few photos I got of her wearing two of her new back-to-school skirts. My favorite is the plaid one-- so so so awesome.

Another one for the "I Can't Believe You Made Me Wear That!" file

As many of you know, J, R, and I are moving 1,500 miles away in about two weeks. In preparations for this move, we have been packing. In the course of packing, we have been discovering.

Yes, discovering. Discovering long-hidden treasures in the recesses of our closets. Such as this baby outfit that I received from my grandmother several years ago, after a couple of my aunts helped clean out her upstairs closets. I think this might be a baby outfit my mother wore. It fits R!

I hope you all like it. I think R really pulls it off. Don't you?

Trying to instill the Buckeye spirit early

For her birthday, R received two Ohio State t-shirts--her first pieces of Ohio State gear--from my college roommate and her husband. She was so excited!J took a few shots of me trying to get her to do O-H-I-O. She wasn't too thrilled about this, though.

OHI (Her arms are a little short, so I helped.)OShe got a lot happier when I put her sunglasses on.

Larry the Cable Guy on girls' clothing

According to this post on the Celebrity Baby Blog (yes, I confess to a shameful enjoyment of seeing pictures of celebrities and their kids), Larry the Cable Guy, talking about his 8-month-old daughter, said:

You always dress [baby] girls up as old people. The other day, my little girl was wearing a purple spandex flowery pair of pants and a top with a basket of fruit on it as a design. My mom came around the corner wearing the same outfit [Reagan] had on!

Tell me that this quote doesn't describe this outfit: a tiered shirt and matching pant set with an embroidered pineapple/watermelon/strawberry on top in the front. (I really need to get a better picture of the front, but you can see most of the fruit thing in the picture below). Could you not totally imagine a little old lady in this?