Murphy's Law and a Big Big Girl

Don't you just love it when Murphy gets a good laugh at your expense?  That happened in our family several weeks ago.  You see, I get the kids ready every morning.  I usually get to choose Cat's clothes for the day, but she doesn't let me do her hair except for Sunday now (alas, 6 year olds have wills of their own).  But she does a pretty good job on her hair, so she's mostly presentable when she leaves the house.  Of course, she's come up with a few interesting styles...

Don't get me wrong.  I love that Cat likes to do her hair, and I love that she experiments with different styles.  What I'm trying to show here is that when Cat occasionally breaks out of her low-ponytail habit, it's because she decides to do something pretty dramatic.  She likes to make a statement.  I don't even have pictures of the more dramatic styles she's come up with - you'll just have to trust me.

Now, back to Murphy and his ever-present Law.  As I said, I get the kids ready in the morning.  That is, almost every morning.  There was a morning a while back when I couldn't be here to help Cat get ready for school.  Why not, you may ask?  Well, because I had to have Jack at the surgery center for his hernia surgery at 6am.  Usually that wouldn't be a big deal, because I could lay Cat's clothes out and she could do her hair and Ben could get her to school.  But, thanks to Murphy, it ended up being Cat's school picture day.  Yep.

So I gave Cat and Ben very specific directions the night before.  Cat is to wear the shirt I laid out for her.  No other shirt.  Cat is not allowed to do her hair.  Ben must spray her hair with water, part it on the side, and brush it straight.  Nothing else.  Of course, since we're sharing a car these days and I had to take Jack way down to the surgery center early in the morning, Ben and Cat were going to have to ride bikes to school, so Cat would have helmet-head by the time she arrived.  All the better.

The school pictures came home a few weeks later and I was actually quite pleased with the hair, I have to say.  Pretty good, huh?  Not that I would have done anything fancy.... maybe just straightened it, done a little braid, and given it some hairspray.  Oh, and driven her to school.  But still.  Considering the circumstances, they did well.

But somehow I forgot to ask Cat not to wear the neon multi-colored plastic beaded necklace she'd been wearing for the last several days.

Oh well.  It only clashes a little.  And, hey, it shows off a little bit of Cat's personality and interests this year.  (She's been wearing similar necklaces since the beginning of the school year this year.)  And she still looks totally cute, if you ask me.

As if doing her own hair doesn't make her way too big, she said something the other day that showed me all over again how much she's grown up.  She'd spent a few hours at a friend's house playing, and when she got back home our neighbor asked if she could go to her house to play.  I said she could, but that we would be eating dinner soon, at 6:00, and that she needed to be home for dinner.  As she excitedly ran off to her friend's house, she yelled at me over her shoulder, "I know what time that is!  That's when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the six!"  She's been working on telling time for a while now, so I'm not sure why that struck me the way it did, but it was kind of a sign for me.  Maybe the combination of being old and responsible enough to be at various friend's houses after completing her homework for the day, and also telling time well enough to come home when she's supposed to just made a strong statement: she's way too big.