I was a bit of a tomboy as a child - I played with boys a lot, I loved playing with cars and climbing trees. I wore trousers, always looked a bit scruffy and never wore pink.
When DD1 was born, I was very conscious of not wanting to conform to gender stereotypes. Whilst I loved dressing her in cute little outfits, I tried my best to ensure that they were all the colours of the rainbow. In the end she was a very sicky baby and she got through so many changes of clothes that I think her first six months were spent more or less permanently in sleepsuits. As she got older, I would dress her in trousers as these were far more practical - especially for nursery. I also continued in my quest for "anything but pink", and was proud when she told me her favourite colour was orange.
DD2 came along a couple of years later, and it slowly became inevitable that a certain female bias crept into the house. Other people bought dolls, fairy dresses and pink frilly things. I kept to my sensible trouser rule, though. Lately, however, this has been a real struggle. To some extent, DD2 has always been the easy-going one. For a long time I thought I had missed the terrible twos completely - however, it just turns out she is a bit of a late developer on the tantrum front, and just as she is approaching her third birthday, she has developed some very clear ideas about what she does and does not like.
What she does like: wearing a skirt. So much so that every morning instead of a "good morning", she waltzes into the bedroom and pronounces: "I want to wear a skirt today". As we do not actually possess many skirts in her size, this causes a few problems, to say the least.
The equation goes something like;
DD1 wearing mainly trousers + DD2 being the unfortunate recipient of mainly hand-me-downs = Temper tantrums in the mornings.
The only compromise she will accept is by promising the PINK trousers... which begs the question, how did it come to this?!
