Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank Read Online Free Page B

“It’s just a few moments of glory, a gorgeous new outfit, a fancy hairstyle, and listening to a bunch of strangers tell you how beautiful you are when it’s over. Rather like an episode of
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
    “Huh?”
    “Never mind, sugar lump. I’m sure your time will come.”
    At that moment, her little friend piped up behind us, “I’m going to be a flower girl for the
third time
next month and I’m going to get my hair curled on top of my head and I’m going to look just like Cindy-rella. You’ve
never
been a flower girl?” She tossed back her head and laughed, then formed the dreaded
L
with her pudgy little nail-bitten fingers, identifying my precious as a “loser.”
    “That’s okay,” I said, a trifle too loudly. “She’s just acting mean because she knows that her parents don’t love her as much as her little sister.”
    “Waahhh!”
    After this unpleasantness, I decided to put the word out that I had a flower girl for hire. We even had a dress. Last spring, when a friend postponed her wedding indefinitely on account of her fiance lost his life’s savings on one of those gambling cruise boats, we found ourselves stuck with a tastefully simple white organza dress with tiny yellow daisies dancing across the empire waist.
    I told everyone that Sophie was ready to be a flower girl, and I was past the point of caring if it was for anyone we even knew. I knew she’d be great at it, not melting down like the really young ones. I hate it when people put their toddlers in weddings and end up pushing them down the aisle. It’s not like we don’t see all this, and it detracts from the sacredness of the moment to see the fat bottom of somewoman in a silk shantung suit duck-walking down the aisle going, “Go on now, Misty Rae! You can do it!” Inevitably this is greeted with tears, and the flower basket is tossed until the duck-mama gives up and says loud enough for everyone to hear, “If you want that Dora’s Talking Doll House, you’ll move your ass down that aisle right now, little missy, you hear me?”
    My daughter wouldn’t even need to eat your reception food. Unless you were actually planning to serve Rugrats apple sauce and PB&J without the crusts, of course, which she would be powerless to resist.
    And I’d make sure she stayed away from that nasty chocolate fountain that everybody’s so crazy about now. I went to a wedding reception, and there was a little boy sticking his finger in the fountain, licking it down to his knuckle and then
sticking it back into the fountain.
It’s not just kids, of course. Grown-ups act like idiots when they get around a chocolate fountain, oohing and aahing and
double-dipping
their half-eaten wedges of pound cake and strawberries, spreading their germs everywhere. And there’s always that one redneck who thinks it’s hilarious to stick his head in the fountain and let the chocolate drip down his throat. I swear, we near ‘bout got divorced over that one.
    The point is, my kid deserved to be a flower girl, and so, amazingly, she finally got her chance when my husband’s sister, Linda, got married for the first time at age fifty-one.
    We were thrilled for Linda and Todd because they seemed so well-suited for one another but, to be honest, I was even more thrilled that Sophie would finally get to be a flower girl. Unless . . .
    What if Linda decided that she wanted a simple ceremony without any attendants whatsoever? I adore my sister-in-law, but she’s a threat to go all intellectual-hippie on me at any given time. To be fair, when a woman has waited fiftyone years to marry the man of her dreams, she has every right to have the wedding she wants. Unless I decide otherwise.
    I decided to give her a long-distance call.
    “Linda, if you don’t ask Sophie to be your flower girl, I swear that I will never speak to you again as long as I live.”
    “What are you talking about?” Linda said, genuinely puzzled. “Of course I want her to