Care Bears are the New Black

Getting my 2 year old dressed each morning is a struggle.  She is already very opinionated about her clothing and shoe choices.  I know this sounds ludicrous.  I mean she is two give her two options and let her pick or better yet just put whatever on her.  However, I have tried both of these methods many times with terrible results.  Typically, this ends with me restraining her to dress her and then she gets mad, cries and gets naked again anyhow.

Recently I have been trying to encourage her independence by allowing her to pick her own clothing and dress herself.  Usually if we are leaving our house I do try hard to have more influence; but, many times I fail even at this.  Countless times she leaves are home looking as though she has been in the wilderness camping for weeks on end.  She loves one particular dress that on many occasions I wash each night to avoid a fight in the morning.  I am sure that her daycare workers probably think she only has three old dirty things as this is all I can seem to get her to put on right now.  I am okay with this. 

She wore her winter boots well into May.  She is very difficult to catch and try and get pants on.  If they are pink then she may stay still long enough to get them on depending on the day.  Sometimes after she is asleep and I go to check on her I find her naked or wearing a princess dress, neither are what she was initially put to sleep in.  Only a select few can comb her hair and I am not one of the select few.

I can't blame her as I too am rather particular.  I have had my fair share of fashion mishaps including ill-filling military pants with baby tees (i.e. trying to emulate Gwen Stefanie in the 90's) and am told when I was about her age I wore my lifejacket for the entire summer, including to town and while trike riding.  No one in my personal life dare buy me an article of clothing unless a gift receipt is included or it has been preapproved by me.  This being said, I believe that may be why I give her a little more room to express herself in this area. 

So although I was thrilled the other day to receive a bag of handed down items all in her size I knew I had to plan my next move cautiously.  I knew I couldn't just place the items into her closet (I have tried this in the past and she does not believe the clothes are hers and thus will not wear them) or god forbid attempt to just put something on her, so I set them aside and  waited until I could come up with a good strategy.

The best idea I could come up with was to turn our spare room into a "shopping center/dress up area" where she could pick out things and pretend she was shopping for all of her new clothes.  That was a week ago and so far we have added two new things to her wardrobe, a Care Bears t-shirt, and a green dress that reminds her of Tinkerbelle.  My spare room now looks like we were ransacked and robbed with things thrown everywhere.

Hopefully by fall she has finished her shopping and thank goodness we don't have a lot of overnight visitors.