You've probably seen baby girls wearing head garters, you know, elastic bands with a big bow or flower, a sad attempt to disguise the fact that the kid is bald. Those things are bad enough, but it gets worse. You can actually get headbands for babies with hair attached, so your bald baby girl doesn't look bald and, I guess, looks more like a girl.
My kid wasn't exactly bald, but she had a bad greasy comb-over for a while. Still, I never stuck a head garter on her. Yuck! Gross! Ugly! Plus, in some dark anxious corner of my soul, head garters will slip down to the baby's neck and hazard! Strangulation will occur! (And I'm not even a helicopter parent.)
I've never been a girlie-girl, and one of the reasons we kept our child's sex a secret was to minimize the pinkalicious pink pink pink that revealing her to be a girl would have caused. But after she was born, and announced as a girl, the little pink dresses and footies and hats and blankets came rolling in. So, she wore plenty of pink in those early days. It's kind of unavoidable.
One day, when she was about six months old, in those halcyon period when she went to work with me every day, I went out to get a sandwich for lunch. She was wearing a pink sundress and a pink hat and strapped on my chest in the Bjorn. As I was paying for a my sandwich, the guy asked me how old HE was. I said "she's a girl!" and he asked "but where are her earrings?"
A head garter with bangs would not have done the trick.
I can see why the baby-clothes manufacturers want to emphasize the gender-specific clothing. They can sell twice as much. My oldest was a girl, and everyone kept giving her pink and purple outfits, which then seemed just a little odd when the clothes got passed down to her brothers. I don't know if it's a result of that or not, but all my boys will happily wear hot pink and bright purple as adults.
ReplyDeleteOh my, that made me laugh.
ReplyDeleteMy older son has enormous eyes (from moi :) ) and long lashes. His father really didn't want me to cut the baby's hair -- swear it was shoulder length before he was a year old. But when someone asked us how old she was? He couldn't ask me to cut it fast enough.
OH HELL NO. Wrong wrong wrong. My babies were bald so that's what babies are SUPPOSED to look like in my book. No headbands, no earrings, and I didn't find out what gender they were because I said the chances I was going to decorate in pink or buy pink clothes was slim anyway. Then I had a girl the second time and I did dress her in pink, on purpose. And one lady still called her a fat little fella, but what the hell. (The lady wasn't so svelte herself. Hmph.)
ReplyDeleteMy husband thought the headbands were the devil's work. The baby bangs thing is just ludicrous and sad.
ReplyDeleteNo head garters, no head bands. I could handle all the pink -- I figured it would eliminate any and all questions about whether she was a he or a she. Yeah, no. (not that there were many cases, but it surprised me every time.)
ReplyDeleteI got the very same question, someone wondering why my baby girl wasn't wearing earrings! She wasn't wearing anything particularly girly, but the questioner was astonished that a baby girl would have naked earlobes.
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