Child Style, Once Upon a Time This August Morning

I’ve decided to post pictures of my youngest daughter in her everyday clothes. Somewhat regularly (notice I can’t commit to an actual schedule…no Child Style Saturdays here). Don’t worry; I’m not going all Spooky Pageant Mama on us… I am just purely delighted and entertained by her little girl sense of fashion. Wanting to share the fun.

I’m trying to figure it out. Nora dresses herself. How/why does she choose each day’s particular combination? She seems to have an organized mind (she likes rows, sets, neat piles)…does she have an actual strategy? There are so many variables to consider. She likes little girl glamour: butterflies, ponies (no princesses please), occasionally bling. But her favorite color is blue; pure, simple (variation: she wears Maurya’s Blue –robin’s egg–with loving loyalty). Meanwhile. Her oldest sister Michaelyn visits wearing animal prints…Nora has started requesting leopard dots and tiger stripes, though she doesn’t have much to choose from yet (I try to distract her with other options when we’re thrifting together). She protests pink in theory; nevertheless, I actually see her wearing it quite a bit. She’s too young to be whimsical (whimsical is when you’re past childhood, looking back wistfully), but she does have a very festive flair. And an uncanny eye for pattern. Except I don’t know that she’s selecting great patterns on purpose. It may be that the top she’s wearing happens to be a favorite, and was conveniently in plain sight when she opened that first drawer…the leggings just visible over yonder, the skirt handy because it doubled as a toga in yesterday’s big game of Dance/Dress Up and is still languishing where it was abandoned in the middle of the floor.

I don’t know. But I am completely smitten.

Here she is with one of her best friends, a welcome regular at my house. They had just discovered a pair of heels I’d left out (careless) in my bedroom. Nora’s hairdo is our “messy bun” strategy, a compromise.  She doesn’t have to brush her hair out completely, if she lets me tuck the messy tangled ends in a bun.

Except for the candids of Nora trying to buckle my sandals and the closeup of peanut butter on Best Friend One’s face, they figured out their poses on their own. No Mama Pageantry here.

Say Yes to the Dress?  What Does That Mean?

My youngest sister is getting married.  In…let’s see.  Twelve days?  About a month ago (give or take a couple weeks), she asked me to make her wedding dress.   Which would have been an outlandish, preposterous request, if there hadn’t been some sort of precedence.

Which thankfully there is.  First of all, I do sew.  Quick history:  I’ve craved pretty clothes since high school.  No, actually…since I knew what clothes were.   Probably before I was coining complete sentences.  And then.  Coupled with the craving–or maybe because of it, I had an I Can Sew epiphany when I was fourteen-ish (having survived thirteen). Mom had fabric and a sewing machine (a 50’s-60’s Singer with persnickety tension).  I recognized a Fashion Opportunity; I just needed to learn how to sew.  My mom was willing to tutor me. For awhile. Eventually, she gave up under duress, objecting to my insistence that it didn’t matter which sleeve went into which armhole—my delusion that there was no significant difference between the fronts and backs of things. My refusal to fix mistakes also annoyed her.

Mom taught me the basics before she left me to my own devices.  Desperate for my homemade clothes to actually look good on…or at least, wanting to keep them (my mother threw away one of my first masterpieces, a dress I refused to put a zipper in or face properly, thinking no one would notice a series of safety pins marching down my back…or a raw edge tucked cleverly under my hair), I gradually learned to appreciate the difference between fronts and backs, and to fix my mistakes.  Put in zippers, buttons, hems, facings (I still despise zippers and facings…but I accept them as a necessary evil).  So that decades later, I can make pretty formals for my girls (and friends, nieces, and sisters) with minimal trepidation. I wish I enjoyed the process more…actual sewing still feels de rigueur to me, a tedious means to an end rather than an amusing hobby.  Necessary because fashion taste exceeds fashion budget (this is also why I thrift), and because it’s next to impossible to find perfect fit and style off the rack, even if I’m feeling rich (and I never feel rich).  Sewing, I can tailor clothes to the particular shape of my body, or someone else’s…in any style and almost any color and fabric.

The last precedent:  I’ve actually sewn one wedding dress.  Well, one and a half. My own wedding dress was a clumsy refashion from my 80’s Gunne Sax graduation dress—who knew there were so many shades and sheens of white? But I did successfully sew a wedding dress for my niece last summer.  Though the project had intense moments, it ended well.  The bride beamed and was her beautiful, unique self in it.

So it’s not inconceivable that my sister would ask me to make her wedding dress.  But it is still a little nerve-wracking.

Have you ever seen “Say Yes to the Dress”?  Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only heard of it.  I didn’t care to watch it.  Aside from minimizing a wedding’s celebratory coalescence of love, commitment, community, and hope in favor of a single dress, there was also reportedly meanness involved.   Mean mothers, mean bridesmaids, mean friends…sometimes even mean brides.

Because life has to be ironic, my daughter Meisha discovered  “Say Yes to the Dress” and began watching it with morbid fascination…at about the same time that I began cutting fronts and backs and sleeves out of lace and satin, hoping for more epiphanies and even possibly divine intervention (no one ever fits a standard pattern perfectly).  I caught glimpses of a few episodes, and I heard every word of several.  Such nitpicking!  Over such beautiful dresses (none of which…no, not one…are anything like my sister’s dress).  Dresses perfectly conceived and assembled, with endless yards of gorgeous fabric, lace, beads, rhinestones, sequins…and no homemade stitching, errant facings, or obvious zippers (and certainly no safety pins).   Once again, as I’ve done with every formal I’ve made…especially with Chandler’s wedding dress last summer, I  doubted.  Doubted whether Nola could possibly be happy with one of my homemade concoctions.

And we’re committed, you see.  Like last summer, there’s really not a back door here.  No plan B. No time to run to a boutique and order the one-and-only dream of a lifetime dress.

And Yet.  When I forget  about “Say Yes to the Dress”, and remember the fun conversation Nola and I shared when we dreamed up her dress (a conversation that ranged from pencil skirts to ample busts to Downton Abbey pre-1920’s fashion)…when I look at my progress, the almost finished pieces of the future assembly (because Nola’s dress is in fact a skirt, a chemise, and a gauzy jacket)…I can’t help but revel.  Mmmm.  Crocheted lace, satin, voile.  Post-Edwardian possibilities.

At least I can say yes to this dress.

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Fourteen Is Proof that You Survived Your Entire Thirteenth Year.

Quite an accomplishment, if you can remember being thirteen.

Fourteen may or may not be an improvement, but the cool thing is you’ve established the fact that you’re a survivor. You’ve set an unforgettable precedent (who can forget their thirteenth year? Or their fourteenth?  Though I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, I can remember distinctly the intensity… mostly, insecurity.  It was palpable in the halls of my middle school. I remember thinking that middle school teachers must be insane, or desperate…).

My daughter just left Thirteen.  Rather breezily.  I am amazed at her resilience. Her cheerfulness in the face of some of the trickiest, most loaded moments of her life. She is beautiful to me. I’m so pleased I get to see fourteen unfold into fifteen, and fifteen into sixteen, and so on. And on.  It will be an amazing journey.

Sometimes I miss her little girl years, when she was my constant shadow, or her brother’s inseparable playmate. But right now is pretty delightful too.

Right now, she says she wants to be a photographer. Study in India (we ask her, why India? and she is vague, which is the prerogative of fourteen year olds…but I think her motive involves elephants and exotic light somehow. Delicious).

Right now, she wants to dance. But she doesn’t want anyone to tell her how. She invents her own moves. Watching her, I think it’s wonderful that gravity is mostly irrelevant to her.

Right now, she loves to sing. Lives to sing. Studies the lyrics on her iphone, listens to the tune for harmonies (she’s harmonizing!), learns a song perfectly. And sings it. I find myself singing along when I’m doing dishes or making dinner.

Right now, she loves animals. She wants to rescue them all. Kittens, particularly. And she has a mystic affinity for owls.

Right now, she dreams of formal dresses. She has watched her sisters dress up for formals; she’s more interested in the formals right now than the boys that she might go to a formal with one day. I’m totally ok with that.

Right now, we aren’t sure she’s grown into her feet yet. She may be the tallest girl of our little clan.

Happy Birthday, Darling.

She Is The Bee’s Knees

My baby is back.  Two months (to the day) from leaving, Maurya flew home early from her 18 month mission in New York/New Jersey. To recover from severe knee distress (and it has truly been distressing, this knee business).  Femoral patella…something-something PAIN. Her time home: yet to be determined. She might recover quickly and want to go back. Or not. We don’t know. She doesn’t know. And we didn’t know her knees were vulnerable when she left (although this shouldn’t surprise us. I have to baby mine,  my sister coddles hers, and Grandpa Compton’s would sometimes…well, seize the day…on the tennis court.  Go all Rustified Tin Man on him).  We know now, bless her darling bee’s knees and lovely pigeon toes. [continue reading…]

Tag! You’re It!

Taby From “The Closet Intellectual” tagged me in a blogging game of tag. I’ve been feeling a little reluctant to acknowledge that I’m IT. Why? I will tell you. When I played tag as a child, the point (the whole point) was to not get tagged. Because getting tagged meant that suddenly, you were seriously compromised (disgraced? discomfited?). Freeze tag? You can’t move. Frozen in some awkward position, you hope a luckier playmate whose superior evasion skills have kept her warm blooded will run by and thaw you so you can move again. Scratch your nose, sneeze. Just plain tag? You get tagged by “IT” (a monstrous appellation, don’t you think?), and you’re either “OUT”, or you’ve just morphed from a nice, ordinary person to the “IT” monster yourself, like the plot of some freaky Twilight Zone episode or awful alien movie your mom won’t let you watch. So traumatizing. [continue reading…]

Make a Dress in Four Hours, Or…A Vintage Midsummer’s Dream

“My soul is in the sky”—Shakespeare, “Midsummer Night’s Dream

First, the Dream.

It’s all about the photos, really.  Vintage-y, quirky. Taken on date night, downtown. I  can almost convince myself that they were taken decades and decades ago, in some secret garden. They suggest (to me at least) otherworldliness.

And while I like how they turned out after I played with them, I really cannot take them seriously. I was there. I remember very well that I knew not what to do with myself. [continue reading…]

Actually, I’m Probably Not Qualified to Dispense Hiking Tips. But You Should Read This Anyway.

Either To Learn From My Mistakes (A Cautionary Tale?), Or To Feel Transiently Smug Because Your Outdoorsy Mistakes are Superior to Mine (I’m Totally Ok With That; We Can Still Be Friends).

Tip #1: Don’t forget your shoes. Bring both of them. [continue reading…]