Little Animals

I’ve been buying Madeline a lot of cat shirts recently.  One way it started is that Madeline has almost no sense of style.  Basically the only thing she cares about with her clothes is that they are soft and comfortable.  So when she gets a shirt she doesn’t care what’s on it, only that it’s soft or not.

So Madeline tends to defer to me about what should be on the shirt.  Now, they have a lot of really dumb shirts out there for girls.  And they also have a lot of semi-sexual shirts out there for little girls.  There’s shirts that say stuff life “Boys like me” or “I’m a heartbreaker.”  Those seem innocent enough.  But there’s also shirts that say things like “99% Angel, 1% Devil.”  What is that supposed to mean?  I saw a pair of shorts that say “Cute” right across the buttocks.  What the hell kind of message is that supposed to send?  I even saw this shirt at Old Navy that said, “I’m a total slut and I’ll probably be pregnant in 2-3 years.  Old Navy.”  I thought that was a little extreme, but I guess irreverent shirts are in fashion these days.

Anyway, I don’t encourage Madeline to buy those shirts.  Instead I go the opposite way:  I encourage her to buy cat shirts.  She has probably 4-5 of these cat shirts.  And to me, the message of these shirts, as opposed to those slut-themed shirts, is that ” My name is Madeline and I am a little dork.”  So that pretty much encapsulates Madeline’s personality and my parenting goals.