My daughter told me the other week she couldn’t find any long pants in her shorts drawer. I adjust the children’s clothing in their dressers based on the change in season and this was shortly after I’d removed most of her pants, replacing them with shorts. I do this for her so she has less items of clothing to sort through to find what she wants to wear. I do this for my son, because he will continue to wear his known, preferred clothing even when the temperature makes it uncomfortable for him to do so.
With my daughter, who has always liked shorts, I was flummoxed at why she would want to wear pants when the weather had had days in a row in the eighties and even nineties. Thinking back, I recalled her wearing pants a lot, even after telling me she liked the new shorts I’d gotten her at the used clothing store.
I thought maybe it was similar to her brother, a simple preference because her pants were knowns to her. And yet she was wearing a lot of the new short-sleeved shirts I’d bought. So I asked her. She dodged the question at first but then told me it was because she had scratches on her legs.
She did and does have scratches on her legs. She has bruises too. Sometimes she even has bits of eczema. Her legs are in a constant state of infirmary. She’s never shown any signs of being self-conscious about anything before. A lot of worrying about how we look is based on knowing what we look like and comparing ourselves to how others look. And she can’t do that.
But other children might have asked her why her legs are scratched up—and she doesn’t have much of an answer other than, “I can’t see so I run into things all the time”. Which is exactly what happens. I don’t think (if this is what happened) the question was asked in a teasing way. Her kindergarten class is a little too young for that. But something about it bothered her.
She’s ending the school year choosing to wear pants every day. When I suggest shorts she’s fine with them, but she selects pants every morning. Two more days of kindergarten and she’ll be a first grader. I think I’m much more excited about that than she is.
The Big Boy Update: My son and I went to Biscuitville today for breakfast. We go every so often together and have eggs, bacon, pancakes and of course biscuits. He asked me if Biscuitville was my favorite restaurant. I told him it was certainly one of them but that I didn’t think I could say any single restaurant was my favorite because I like so many different places and types of food. He said, “my favorite restaurant is eating food. I like at least one thing at every restaurant.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter has been having fun with puffy stickers with her friends on her cab ride. I have a big assortment from well before the children were born I didn’t think I’d ever find a use for. Random sticker sheets that would be useful if I was an avid scrapbooker—which I’m definitely not. I don’t know what they do with the stickers in the car, but Beverly, their driver, says they don’t make a mess and it keeps them occupied so I keep sending them. Today my daughter came home, handed me the now empty bag the stickers had been in that morning. She took off her shoes and socks and then reached inside the collar of her shirt and started pulling sticker after sticker off her chest to put on the table. There were so many I started laughing, asking her if that was her, “spare sticker storage”. She and I laughed together as she found twenty-odd stickers. Did she possibly get the idea because her chest is where they put the EKG leads which are stuck on her every time she has an EUA?
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