Sunday, September 05, 2010

When 'So Cute' becomes 'Too Cute'!

Last weekend Cali, Grandpa and I went garage-saling. (Yeah, I know it's not a word but how do you correctly say it?)

Cali found a darling little Asian dress. Thursday night she decided she was going to wear it to school on Friday.
Friday morning she put it on and it was truly adorable. Really! All of us were admiring her cute self. Cassi mentioned that I should put her hair in a bun and so I did.


Then we remembered we had these cute little chopsticks made just for hair and we added them. And all of a sudden her cuteness took on a whole new level. Seriously. And when it did, well she kind of froze. She got incredibly nervous.  She started saying she wasn't sure if she should wear her outfit. She was afraid people would laugh at her.We convinced her she was darling and we headed off to school.

We got out of the car to head in when the cross-walk lady saw her and kind of screeched, "Oh my goodness, you are the cutest thing ever" or something close to that and Cali went scurrying behind my legs. I managed to get her as far as the front door but at least 4 more people talked to her about her cute-ness. By the time we reached that door, she decided she wasn't going past it and just hid behind it.

I tried real hard to just leave her there and go in but even hiding behind an all clear glass door she was cute and people kept telling her so. She was near screaming point when I figured I'd better take some action.
We decided on the count of 3 she would choose to walk left through the front doors or right to head back to the car to go home and change outfits. 1-2-3... she couldn't choose, so I marched her to the right and sped home. I was a bit concerned that it would prove to be unfair to the kindergarten teacher to make her go in wearing the outfit. (We still have a few kids struggling with being away from Mom every day and there are still many tears. Knowingly sending Cali in with more tears would not be nice of me I decided.)

This is what we changed into, although she was still saying, "Maybe I should just wear this dress Mom" when we arrived at the house.

As you can see, she was still battling her decision. We finally agreed that we might try the little Asian dress another day but I wonder if sometimes 'so cute' can be 'too cute' and just not worth the hassle.

5 comments:

Sandy said...

Sounds like you made the right decision! It would be better to wear the dress one or two places for special for a while (where it is acceptable to be told you are cute!) and then it will be less of an ordeal. a child doesn't want to be singled out at all if they are just starting school unless they are total hams to start with.

People who made comments like that about a Certain Young man in our house at that age definitely got put on his black list. ESPECIALLY if you said he was cute.

Tell her I think she looks elegant. It is so much nicer than cute and more accurate.

Tell her not to worry about wearing it at school, it was probably hard to run around in on the playground anyway. ;) wink

Sandy in Bracknell

Jocelyn said...

She did look so cute!! Maybe she can wear it to a nice resturant or somewhere nice...I loved it, I had one just like it in red!

M. Kasch said...

Wow, You handled that really well! I hope that I'm such a patient mother!
She WAS cute, but then again- she's always pretty darn cute!

Anonymous said...

We have a lot of wardrobe changes with my own 5-year-old daughter. It doesn't take much around here to convince her she needs to give an outfit the boot. We like to call her Cher, in fact.

There's always something to keep you on your toes with little kids.

Shawn said...

So cute!!