1m2aSandbox

So last week our big project was the re-doing of Cora’s bedroom. Declaring yellow “not pretty any more”, she asked for a pink room, offering Maddie her bedspread, lovely vintage prints of wildflowers, and more as she pink-i-fied her room. Cora’s dream? To turn her room into a ballet haven, complete with a sign on the door saying “Do not come in unless you are a dancer!”

All went well to start, as you probably saw in my last blog. We spackled holes, moved out furniture, taped off trim and ceilings, and primed the whole room. Cora chose to sleep with Maddie that night, and we closed the door on her pristine white room, the only furniture in there her big bed covered in plastic in the center of the room. I tucked the girls into Maddie’s bed and said a cheerful good-night.

And then Cora started crying.

Both girls this year have asked to paint their rooms, and Brian and I agreed to give that concession to them as a birthday gift.

Sure, we could shell out five hundred bucks per room to hire someone to do all the hard work, but what would be the fun in that? I remember re-decorating my room a few times as I was growing up, and loved the DIY-ness of it every time. We were operating on a negative budget, but my mom never made me feel like we were doing it to save money: painting and moving furniture and sewing our own curtains was part of the fun of it all.

Yesterday Cora and I drove past a neighborhood Montessori school housed in a fanciful building replete with towers and royal-like flags.

“Mommy,” Cora said, “That building looks like a castle, but it’s not a castle. It’s really a children’s school.”

A friend of mine told me that her daughter recently walked out of a bathroom and remarked casually, “Every time I look in the mirror I’m surprised that I’m pretty.”

Nonplussed, my friend pressed the issue and learned that her daughter considers herself unattractive – not because of anything that anyone has said, it’s simply how she sees herself.

Now, my friend and her husband are excellent parents and raise all their children thoughtfully and deliberately, and made the choice a long time ago that they would not dwell on appearances when speaking with their children, especially their daughters. So a compliment from them might sound something like this: “Hey, your outfit looks very pulled together today! I can see that you spent a long time working on it.”