Hats and Pearls and Dresses, oh my!

Here we are, Maggie, just you and me in the mornings while brother is at school.  Just us and a box of dress up things.  It's never really too early to start digging into that box, putting on all sorts of costumes and pretending to go on big adventures.

I remember as a child rearranging rooms to make my bedroom a library, where I cataloged each of the books with homemade library stickers.  I would charge overdue fees to my parents.  I would take cups of flour and with a fan, blow fake dust all over them to make them seem old and mysterious.  (Not particularly something my mother was fond of).  I also took half of the downstairs and turned it into an art gallery of my collection of "Little Mermaid's Sisters" I had created by tracing a picture I had of Ariel and changing the hair styles and colour of the tails.

But we also loved to play dress-up, wearing old fashioned clothing with aprons.  We would mix clean toilet paper in buckets of water pretending to boil wool and then string it out on the split rail fence to dry in the sun.  We would try on our mother's dresses, our father's ties and put on silly glasses.  And we would get into the jewelry and shoes too.  And we would parade around in my mother's wedding dress, delighted as we got bigger and bigger each year and started to nearly fit it.  Boy, did we feel like we were getting more and more grown up in that dress.

Dressing up sure holds fond memories for me and I enjoy watching my children as they use their imaginations to be dinosaurs, train conductors, race car drivers and little mommies and daddies.  Maggie is just as happy covered in dirt and goop as she is with a string of pearls around her neck, whatever hat she can find around the house and various pieces of clothing--mine, her brother's, mittens, shoes, whatever.

As our children play pretend and dress-up, I am keenly aware of what a huge responsibility we have as parents to be good role models.  Our children are constantly watching and mimicking us, and each other.  I hear conversations and see actions repeated weeks later, phrases and intonations copycatted. It really makes me think about how these early years we are investing in their lives are so crucial.  I know that they will grow up and be so very much themselves with their own personalities, set their own goals and make their own decisions.   And it starts so young, this assertion of independence.  But, while I can, I am enjoying the times when they look at us with their big adoring eyes and dress up in our shoes and clothes and want to be just like us.