5 Going On 15

Miss Pink has decided she wants to be just like her mommy. This is not entirely new, but her desire to look exactly like me at all times is. It’s sweet of her, and I will wax nostalgic about it someday when she scorns my mildest fashion suggestions, but it can pose problems when we’re getting dressed. For one thing, she has a lot more pink clothes than I do. Today I had to wear a green T-shirt because that was the theme of today’s clothing. She was sad that I didn’t have green pants like hers. I was not sad about that. Thank goodness she can be persuaded that certain colors go together even if they don’t exactly match. (Thank you, Clinton and Stacy.)

It's part of wanting to be grown up. I get that. To her it seems like grown-ups have all the fun. She doesn't know there are days I'd trade places with her in a heartbeat, if it weren't for having to grow up all over again.

She even wants to shave her legs like Mommy. I don’t give her an actual razor. It’s a bladeless plastic razor that came with some depilatory foam. She lathers up her tiny leg and goes to town scraping the foam off. It cracks me up, thinking that someday this is going to be a chore she hates and now she thinks it is just the coolest thing.

She also talks like a teenager sometimes. (This is one of the things that surprised me most about preschool-age girls: I thought all the flouncing and eye-rolling and sarcasm came later. But no.) Her little brother (like most two-year-olds) has a favorite saying: “My do it!” He will back up this assertion with temper tantrums if he doesn’t get to do whatever it is (like, say, pour his own milk). This weekend Miss P said with world-weary scorn, “He says ‘My do it’ for everything.” Like, whatever.

Watching her grow up and getting to fix her hair just like Mommy's every day is one of the best things about my life.