Clair yells to me from the backseat: "Mommy! (she said "Mommy" like 13 times because she has that hilarious toddler stutter). Mommy! Can-can-can-can-can-can-can-can we go in the pink store?"
I had no idea what she was talking about until I turned quickly and saw the T-Mobile store, which looked something like this.
"Oh no, baby. That's not a store for kids. It's a phone store. It's for adults to buy phones," I said.
Clair responded: "But-but-but-but-but-but-but it's PINK!"
She was not saying adult stores that sell phones shouldn't be pink. She was saying she NEEDED to go in that store because it was pink, regardless of what was actually being sold in it. Pink = need!
At the ice cream shop, Clair didn't want any of the ice creams available because none of them were pink. So she settled for vanilla ice cream with a heap of pink sprinkles. She ate the sprinkles and stirred the ice cream into a pale pink soup. Then she drank it.
Three days ago, when Lester was taking the kids to the park, I packed snacks and water bottles for them. Clair's sippy cup was among the missing (as usual), so I gave her what is supposed to be her "school cup." It used to be Dean's, but it now has her name on it. It's stainless steel with blue and yellow accents (you know the one.)
She recoiled when she saw it and screamed, "Nooooooo! I want my gur-rul cup! (She says "girl" like "squirrel.") I don't want that cup! That's DEAN'S! I want my GUR-RUL CUP!"
I had no idea what she was talking about, until we realized she wanted one that we took to the beach with us, with pink and turquoise polka dots on it.
She flat out refused the stainless steel one and cried until we poured the water into the cheap plastic polka-dotted one.
Oh, she also calls her navy blue Mary Jane shoes her "princess shoes" and asks if every girl she sees on coloring books or TV commercials is a princess. One day I put on my clothes for work and felt especially winning, so I smiled down at my child and said to her, "How does Mommy look?"
She took in my slacks and flat shoes and said disapprovingly, "You-you-you-you-you not a princess."
I PROMISE you, we have never called anything in our house a "girl" anything or a "boy" anything.
Even with my love of little girls in little girly things, we have not pushed pink on her in any way. Her room is green. Her bookbag is Sesame Street's brand of primary colors. I like to think she wears clothes in lots of different colors, pink included, but not exclusively. And the poor girl barely has toys of her own, because we thought it was stupid to buy them when her brothers had a zillion toys she could play with. But the ones she does have are not any more pink than they are green or blue or multi-colored.
And we have NO princess anything in our house, other than the daily 10,000 playings of "Let it Go" on my iPod. Not that I am opposed to princesses - or pink. But we just haven't gotten there yet. Or so I thought.
I say all this to say: Well-played Princess Industrial Complex. Somehow you have pinkafied my daughter and I don't even know how.
