2 Major Battles

While this may look like a boring picture of a normal event, it symbolizes 2 MAJOR battles that have been long fought and now won. First and longest battle has been the hair. Because Lj's hair grew sooooo slowly, she didn't even really have enough hair to do anything with until she had a well-formed will. She's NEVER wanted anything in it until the last 4-6 months when I've been able to convince her to wear a hairband.

The wonderful influence of adults who are NOT your mama are clearly in play here as her teacher one day offered to braid her hair. Well well well. Little miss Lj now wants her hair in braids everyday (= I'm loving it!

The second major battle is the uniform pants. She was DESPERATE to wear a skirt but they don't do skirts in the uniform until they are in 1st grade. She was Soooooo distraught and one day I found out why. "but MAMA! Princesses don't wear pants!!! waaaaaaawaaaaawaaaawaa". I said that I was SURE that princess wore pants to school. "But mama! I can't be beautiful! I can't wear jewelry with pants!" "Really Layla? Your teacher is beautiful and wear jewelry and she wears pants. Besides, with the princesses you only see them posing for pictures and not at school." How she has sucked up every stereotype about Disney princesses is amazing given the culture we live in. The images are there for sure, but not NEARLY like in the US.

SO anyway. Once we got to school that same day, her teacher said the exact same thing that I did...and with no prompting. "Oh Layla, I am sure that princeses wear pants to school!" (; bless her. She has been teaching for 10 years, mostly in Jed.dah, Sa.udi Ara.bi.a. She is from India and just as sweet and gentle as can be (=