My outfit, my choice

This is my entry for the contest hosted by @verhp11. In short it is about sharing one of your own pictures and tell the story behind the picture.

You can find the exact rules in his contest post.

This is the picture I would like to share:

In this picture the little one is almost 3 years old. The outfit may be a little off, shorts of the thinnest fabric ever, cotton t-shirt, wintercap and mittens.

Every parent can tell you, parenting is fascinating, fun and sometimes not so much fun. As a parent you do the best you can, you make mistakes, you learn from them, pretty similar to the way our kids learn new things. Parenting is something you learn while doing it. When you finally get the hang of it, your kids will have reached an age they don't need that much parenting anymore. But nothing is lost, we'll just use it on our grandchildren :).

Back to the image. We decided to give the kids (although we had only one when this picture was taken) some freedom of choice from early age on. One of those choices included clothing. She could wear whatever she wanted.

So yes this resulted in unexpected combinations. She went to a playdate wearing a (clean) pyjama top because it was the best thing she could find to match the trousers she picked out. The funny thing was, she was never wrong, colorwise.

The day of the picture was a sunny day, the sharp shadows prove that. Her outfit seemed like a good summer outfit when we were ready to leave. While walking out the door she noticed a tip of her winter stuff peeping out of a box. She was certain, she needed that, it was just what her outfit needed to be perfect.

Of course we mentioned the sun, the high temperature. Suggested she would step outside for a moment to feel the warmth, which she did. But it didn't make her change her mind. This was the perfect outfit to wear, to walk a few miles. And she did.

It is amazing how well kids do when you let them make their own choices from early age on. The same thing happened when packing our bags for a vacation.

We let her pack her own bags, they learn a lot from it, and you as a parent learn a lot about their view on this vacation.

They feel part of the vacation, because they are doing what you are doing, packing your bags. They learn about space, they can only bring as much as fits into their bag. You can see what they expect to do on vacation by looking at the stuff they want to bring.

When they are done, you walk them through some scenarios and let them find out whether or not they brought the needed supplies to complete the scenarios. At the age of 5 she was perfect at it, knew exactly what she needed. Brought too many clothes of course, but who doesn't :)

If you think your kid will go wild when making its own choices, you can limit the choice to a few options you are all okay with, no matter which one it chooses. Approving their choices works miracles for their selfesteem.

Camera

This picture is a scan of a printed picture. It is either taken with my old Praktica MTL3 (which stopped working at some point) or my old Canon IXUS APS (which I foolishly dropped, completely ruining the lens).