frills & furbelows

I put this green gingham dress on Ellie today. It's one of the ones I got at the swap meet I went to recently. It looks a little odd, though cute, to me; I'm not sure if it's just that I'm not used to seeing her in anything girly or what. Maybe it's that she has the androgynous baby thing going on so the dress looks slightly like she's in drag. When I put her little white dress on her a couple weeks ago, it didn't look this weird, but it's also a much simpler dress. Maybe this dress is just weird.

I have a major pet peeve with color-coding babies by gender. When I was pregnant with Abigail, we'd found out the gender, and I went on this huge campaign asking people to not give us pink clothing for her. A lot of people still did; it's like this total lemming instinct that baby girls must wear pink. I'll be honest, it's not my favorite color (although, truth be told, I went through a phase as a little girl where I was crazy for pink and purple). However, we received so many pink things that I found there was an occasional outfit that I did like. They tended to be the less frilly items. I'm just not a frilly person. Cute things, yes; frilly, no.

So when I was pregnant with Ellie, we decided to not find out the gender (okay, my husband persuaded me that we should refrain after many hours of argument). This was great in terms of clothing gifts, which were all delightfully neutral colors. Except for the people who waited til after she was born to send gifts, resulting in another barrage of pink. Again, there were a few items that were pretty awesome, or pretty and awesome, and those I put in the 'doesn't make me want to vomit' pile.

However, fully one-half of Ellie's closet is now stuffed with clothes I plan to donate to the local domestic violence safehouse. And I mean stuffed. It's like a cotton candy machine mated with a bubble gum machine and spawned enough baby clothes to take over Rhode Island.