Just Look in the Mirror

As you may have gathered over the years, Charlotte is a girly girl who loves her frills and accessories. This morning, once dressed, even with hair brushed, she, totally fishing for a compliment, asked Lorelei, "How do I look?"

Lorelei tends to get straight to the point. With a whiff of annoyance, she replied, "Just look in the mirror."

I laughed, because Lorelei's response was so classically Logical, with a capital L, probably a reflection of her Chris Hofmann genetics.

A little disappointed, Charlotte complied and went over to gaze at herself in my full-length mirror. "Oh," she said, twisting this way and that, "I look very nice." Pleased with her reflection, she happily trotted off to play.

The whole exchange took less than 30 seconds, but I was sort of stunned at all the truths it contained.

For starters, Lorelei corrected her sister's thinking in a quick, logical manner. Don't look to me for validation, she seemed to say. Take a look for yourself. See what you see. My opinion doesn't matter.

Getting zero feedback from her sister, Charlotte had no choice but to take it upon herself. (I was busy fishing around in my closet and getting dressed.) So she did. And Charlotte liked what she saw---a bright-eyed girl with frizzy hair (she had braids post-bath last night), a mismatched bow attempting to hold some of that hair out of her face, and a long summer dress.

Oh, mothers of daughters. It is a happy moment when your girl-child relies on her own opinion of her beauty, rather than that of others.

With Charlotte's girliness and love of dressing up, she has a strong desire to be pretty. It's a scary thing, a balancing act, to give her free reign to express herself in frills while fostering the self-knowledge that what really matters is on the inside---a vague, broad, and utterly confusing idea, to children and adults alike.

So, I take what I can, encouraged by the little corrective push Lorelei gave her sister: Look at your own damn reflection, Charlotte. Decide for your freaking self.

So, then. What are we reading? The girls are STILL obsessed with Dragons Love Tacos. Charlotte's interest is starting to wane a bit, as we have indeed read the dang book dozens of times. Lorelei, however, is still utterly in love with it.

Charlotte has been reading a mishmash of books aloud, and of course I'm insanely proud of her reading skills, which improve with each book. She has done most of the reading lately (reading to me), but I have read to her from Lady Lollipop and Little House in the Big Woods, along with some so-so picture books we checked out from the library.

Me, I recently finished Mr. Emerson's Wife, which was lovely and I'd recommend to anyone even remotely interested in the Transcendentalists. I also finished Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which, despite its amusingly cheeseball moments, is totally worth a read. Finally, I finished Creativity, Inc., which is one of the far better business and management books I've read.

So, now that those are done, I've been freed up to tackle some new books.

 I started Sarah Waters's The Paying Guests. It's a big fat one, so hopefully it's good. Nothing worse than slogging through almost 600 pages of something you don't love. I also recently began The Women Jefferson Loved, which is great so far. And on my Kindle, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. (See a Jeffersonian theme here?)