Static Cling

I’ll get scant sympathy from those of you digging out from the usual winter (or celebrating a melted Christmas, below the equator), but we’ve had a week of heavy rain here in San Francisco.

Surplus indoor time means discovering new games and also new uses for our long, unruly hair, often all at once:

Van der Graffin’ Hell

Boo, as you know, has a lot of hair, and no interest in cutting it. The weird thing about that isn’t that she has strong opinions (what almost-three-year old doesn’t?) but that she has a strong opinion about her grooming — a rarity, it would seem, amongst her friends, who mostly don’t seem to care much.

Thus: no haircuts for us.

Clothing is a la Boobaby, as well:

Just before she went to the rave

<p>
  I&#8217;ve done an informal survey, and most of our friends are still at the &#8220;offer two outfits, pick one&#8221; stage of child dressing &#8212; a stage Boo blew past a year ago.
</p>

<p>
  Then again, most of them (like *cough* <a href="http://mikeadamick.com/?p=806" target="_blank">Emmeline</a>, the world&#8217;s best-dressed toddler) have lucked into parents with some fashion sense. Not so the case for Boo &#8212; in my closet resides nothing but fleece vests and jeans, and for her part, my wife is always well-dressed but pretty monochromatic. (Black is the new black.) No great surprise, then, that our daughter would want to pick her own clothes.
</p>

<p>
  No surprise, either, that her sartorial supervision has extended to her collection of dolls, swollen by Christmas gluttony to six or seven. Last night before bed, we painstakingly dressed four of them before I insisted that bedtime had arrived, though even then Boo conned me into forcing a pair of her footie pajamas onto her three-foot stuffed Elmo.
</p>

<p>
  Underlying all this, of course, is my utter amazement that a bug-loving tough girl with a stay-at-home dad would go the clothes-and-dolls route at all. Boo was supposed to be so busy tossing toy cars off the roof that she&#8217;d eschew girlish things like fashion and conversation.
</p>

<p>
  Remind me never to expect anything. Or to get used to being wrong.
</p>