Dressing Myself And Others

You know what's a completely thankless task? Learning to dress yourself.

Dressing yourself just paves the way to a lifetime of self-doubt, misunderstandings and frustration. If you are female, for example, you must live with the certain knowledge that every single day in which you leave the house, other women are judging your shoes. Not just looking at them, judging them. Heel too high, heel too low, too tarty too practical too red too shiny too boring too uncomfortable too everything! It doesn't end! And that's just shoes... let us not even go into what one's bra says about one. It's a lot more than anyone without breasts would suspect.

High-school is among the worst times for this, of course, when all your peers put every single item of clothing under a metaphorical microscope and you can spend a year in social purgatory because you wore white socks with black jeans. But it never really stops. If you walk out of the house wearing clothes, you will be judged by said clothes. Eventually you settle on a Look or Looks, accept that not everyone will approve, and move on.

Then.

Then you have a child.

Which you must dress.

And be judged.

Baby K is seven months old. Everyone knows she's not dressing herself. If I take her out of the house in pink corduroy cargo pants with eight pockets, a white t-shirt and a pink tie-dyed jacket, then everyone knows that I'm the one who chose the outfit, not her.

Actually, the pink cargo pants and pink jacket are okay. Because then everyone knows she's a girl. It's all cool, we're all on the same page. But Baby K's favourite colour is orange. (Really, she will go for something orange over any other colour). Orange is not a Girl Colour. I am obviously deliberately setting out to confuse people.

The blue overalls with the lion on the front have also caused confusion, unless teamed with a pink onesie. The blue overalls with the robot on the front lead to complete Gender Role Breakdown. Never mind that I'm a girl and I like robots... no, I am deliberately confusing people and trying to make her into some kind of freak of nature.

I don't know what the critics would make of the fact that I steadfastly refer to the plush turtle with the pink shell with daisies on it as 'Mr Turtle', because I don't want her to grow up thinking that pink and daisies is an exclusively girly thing.

Every mother gets judged on what her child wears. And while, yes, Baby K wears her orange lion outfit and her blue robot overalls and so on, she also wears a lot of pink. Not because she's a girl, or because I'm caving to the Gender Stereotype Mafia, but because I refuse to let anyone's opinions influence how I dress my child.

And her favourite colour may be orange, but mine is pink.

And sometimes green. But mostly, for now, it's pink.

She'll be dressing herself soon enough. Given that I wear comfy flat sandals and running shoes almost exclusively, I may have to get someone in to teach her about shoes.

Writing a novel with a young baby is actually quite difficult. Would not have picked that. In other startling news, rain does not help the laundry get dry and the baby yanking the cord out of the phone means it stops working. I am just learning so much today!

Still, it's been one of those delightfully rainy days which provide a perfect opportunity to remain in one's pyjamas all day, and I have a bag of crystallised pineapple, so my glass is half full.

I do need to buy a new phone, though. Baby K has a strong grip.

NaNoWriMo has begun!

And boy, have I not been the first horse out of the gate. More like 2,340,864th out of the gate. I love NaNoWriMo, and I do it every year, but Baby K really takes up a lot of time. This year's going to be a tough one. So far I'm about four thousand words behind, and it's only day three!

But I am determined. I am going to win this year if I have to spend every weekend pushing Baby K and her dad out of the door at daybreak and not letting them back in until sunset. They could stand to spend more time together, anyway.

I need to spend more time on the train. Baby K tends to either nap or amuse herself on the train, which will give me time to write on the handy-dandy netbook that I bought specifically *for* doing NaNo on the train.

I am also unhappy because my nice new e-book reader appears to be a dud. After more than 24 hours of charging, it still refuses to go beyond the startup screen. The identical reader bought at the same time by my husband is working fine. This is entirely unfair.

Of course, these things *do* always happen in November. I should have known, really.