The Importance of Individuality

For Christmas this year my 7 year old daughter asked for two very...different things. A leather biker jacket with lots of zippers, and hot pink "seeing" glasses. I knew what she was referring to with the biker jacket because over the summer we had taken the kids to Gatlinburg and had those "old time" pictures made. Well, she didn't want her picture in a saloon girl dress, she wanted her picture on a Harley. Black leather hat, jacket, gloves, the works. After they took the picture she clearly stated that she wanted one of those jackets for Christmas. It was really hard to find one in her size, but I eventually did (thank god for eBay) and put it up for Christmas.
The glasses were a different story. I had no idea where this was coming from or really what she was talking about. So we were in the mall one afternoon looking for earrings and she comes running over to me.."These are the glasses I'm talking about Mom!" They were hot pink with little diamonds around the rims. Not sunglasses, regular glasses without a prescription. I said "why?" she just looked at me and said "because I like them". Okay, enough said.
Christmas morning she opened the leather jacket, then the glasses and was of course very excited. She wore them...together, for the remainder of the day. We had to go out on an errand the following day and she put the leather jacket on then the pink glasses. Her oldest sibling whom at the time was 12, says "Oh My Gosh, your not going to wear that out are you?" She said "well, yeah". She turned to me and said "Mom, does this look dumb?" Of course I wanted to say, well....it's not the greatest choice you've ever made in an outfit. But I didn't. I thought, you know what, at least she is not afraid to show her personality. She has a very fun personality and it's awesome that she wants to show it off. So my response was "I think you look fabulous. I promise that you will be the only one at the store with pink glasses and a leather coat on. And if I had to make a bet, when everyone sees you in that outfit, they are going to want to know where you got that stuff so they can try to look half as cool as you do right now." So, she stuck her tongue out at her older sister and got into the car.
So here's to you baby...Your one of a kind!!!