I made a mistake this morning. Well, really I made a mistake last night. And probably the initial mistake was before that, but it’s really hard to pinpoint the exact moment when one began to go terribly, horribly wrong. Suffice it to say that the immediate causes of the terror under which I am laboring are somewhere in the last twenty-four hours.
Last night Margaret was resisting the application of nighttime diapers, and begging to have another daytime (or “play” diaper) put on. I suggested that she could have the nighttime diaper, and we could put the play diaper on her stuffed hippo.
She fell for it, and we congratulated ourselves on a toddler deftly manipulated.
And then this morning, she decided that the hippo could wear clothes.
We put one of her shirts on it first, which she was initially pleased with.
But then she began to think that red on purple wasn’t the best look for the hippo, or that the fact that they were wearing matching shirts might cause confusion, and we might offer her milk or her breakfast to the hippo.
So we took it off.
And then she found a onesie of Ellie’s that she wanted the hippo to wear. It certainly fit better, and – as she is pointing out in the picture – was more thematically suited to the hippo, since it had similarly African animals on it.
And this costume change made her happy.
And this is what fills me with dread. It’s not that I am against Margaret being happy – far from it – but I do worry when she decides that what she absolutely has to do to attain happiness is something that involves a lot of work from me. I know that it doesn’t seem like dressing a hippo would take that much work, but you really haven’t seen the way Margaret does it. It’s labor-intensive. And leaves a trail of discarded clothes across the living room. So we’ll see if she forgets it tonight.
I’m not holding out a lot of hope.
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