A Purple Princess

A few months ago we received a bag of hand-me-down clothes from my sister-in-law Lorie. As I sifted through it, making piles of what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to send to Goodwill, Elisabeth suddenly pulled out this purple dress...or maybe it's a nightgown. But according to Elisabeth it works perfectly for all occasions because she immediately howled for me to put it on her, and she's pretty much been wearing it ever since.

Now you need to understand that the dress is faded, the fabric is worn thin around the wrists, and in general it has seen much better days and would have been better off in the Goodwill pile. Some of you may be wondering why I don't just hurry and get rid of the rag while she's not looking. The problem is that she loves it so completely, I just can't bear to say no. I remember when I was a teenager there was a two year old girl in our ward who loved her moon boots so much she wore them all day everyday, even to church, rain or shine. Her beloved moon boots were a spectacle for the whole ward to enjoy, and that's what has happened with the purple dress. It's just too hilarious to get rid of!

Our purple dress schedule goes something like this: Elisabeth wears the purple dress to bed as a nightgown. Then she wakes up and voila, it's a dress again and she wears it all day long. At bedtime I insist it has juice stains on it and she must retire it to the laundry basket and wear clean jammies to bed. She howls and cries, and I put clean pajamas on her while she kicks and thrashes. The next morning she is eagerly digging through the dirty clothes basket in search of her dress. "It's clean, Mama!" she announces.

No, it isn't.

Two days go by during which time she is constantly reminding me, "Can you please wash my purple nightgown? It's so special." Eventually I give in and wash it, and the cycle starts over again. The only variance to this strict purple dress schedule is when Jeremy is in charge of dressing Elisabeth or getting her ready for bed. When that happens the purple dress is almost always pulled out of the dirty clothes basket, sniffed, and then handed over. "Okay honey, it's probably clean enough. You can wear it," he concludes. Push over! So on those days Elisabeth wears the purple dress for thirty-six hours instead of her usual twenty-four. Is it any wonder she's a daddy's girl?