26 February 2009

She's Not Too Sick To Shop

My daughter has inherited my love of shoes and is known in several circles as "the girl with the pink cowboy boots." For years she's had a pair of either hot pink or metallic pink boots. They remain her very favorite pair of shoes, just edging out the black patent leather "party shoes" (ie, mary janes) with the "high" (1") heel. Had I known how much she'd love those boots I would've bought a pair in every size Target stocked. Ah, hindsight.

Today she is ill, home with a fever hovering between 100 and 101 degrees. She is tired and emotionally fragile. But all that falls by the wayside when I mention the words "new shoes."

It has come to my attention that her current pair of beloved boots will soon be too small for her and as she's told me, she "doesn't like pink anymore."

You read right, my girly-girly girl who used to wear a frothy pink princess nightgown pretty much every day to preschool (when she was 2) no longer cares for pink (or princesses, though Ariel's still OK because she's a mermaid). Nope, red is now the color of choice (I think I see her brother's influence here as red is his very favorite color).

So.

The search for a pair of red boots was on. It was a quick search resulting in Flynn falling in love with these:
I like them, too. But I'm having a difficult time reconciling the fact that Flynn doesn't dig pink anymore. Now I know how my dad must've felt.

When I was a young girl, my all-time favorite color was Donny Osmond purple. I. loved. purple. And my dad, wanting to make me happy, bought me all kinds of purple crap for birthdays and Christmases: a purple bank that looked like a safe, a purple windbreaker, purple Mrs. Grossman stickers, purple this, purple that. He associated me with that particular color.

Then one day, I stopped liking purple and started liking black. And threw my dad for a loop. He could no longer form the equation, purple x + Misc = happiness. Instead, he made more personal gestures that meant more to me than anything purple or black could (a framed newspaper from the day after President Kennedy's assassination that he'd saved for me, books by Twain and Thoreau, his favorite authors, photography books, music, a Japanese paper cut-out of a cat - items I still have to this day, things I cherish).

I know these red boots are just footwear that happen to be in a color Flynn now likes, but on some deeper level, these boots signal her growth. She's letting go of the things she loved as a toddler and preschooler, like the color pink and princesses, and moving on to other Big Girl things, like red cowboy boots and American Girl dolls.

And I'm cool with that. It's exciting.

My daughter and I will both be waiting for the UPS man to bring those red boots. I can hardly wait to see them on her feet.

I just hope they fit.

2 comments:

Jenna said...

do watch How I Met Your Mother? He wears red cowboy boots because he thinks they 'work'.

Enjoy! My boys would love them.

Quigs78 said...

New shoes are the best medicine! And watch out, Misc, because I have a feeling Flynn is going to be one expensive girl! :)