Girls and fashion. Is it innate? We think so-- every girl we know (and a lot of the boys, too!) seem to emerge from the womb with a sense of style. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes it’s so bad that it’s good! We have one friend whose daughter only wears rain boots, even on the sunniest days of summer. Another is addicted to the color purple, and her mom has to scour stores for purple underwear, socks, even shoes. Then there’s the child who insists on wearing the same Hello Kitty t-shirt every single day, so her mom has to wash it nightly. The ones we especially get a kick out of are the kids who just prefer to wear nothing at all! Those poor moms are in a constant struggle to keep their children half-way decent. “Okay, you can take off your shoes & socks, but you have to keep your pants on!” But are any of us actually surprised? Don’t we all have childhood pictures of ourselves in absurd get-ups that must have made our parents cringe?! And don’t even get us started on some of our hairdos!

Joie with her "Save the Polar Bears" flyer & her friend Emily with their new style mantra

GREEN IS THE NEW PINK

- Dinna Huneryager, Contributing Writer

My daughter, Joie, is nine years old, in the fourth grade, and has suddenly gone very GREEN on me. She is my middle child (only girl sandwiched between two very headstrong boys) and is very carefree and almost oblivious to many of the things going on outside of her own girly world. Yet ever since she joined the Environmental Club at her grade school, she is now quite aware of another color besides pink. Everything is about GREEN now. She is one of 60 Environmental Club members at a school of 643 Kinder-6th grade students. She comes home after their monthly meetings ready to change the world. The Club's motto to “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” is now Joie's motto. 

No longer does she spend much of her time on the Club Penguin website trying to buy or earn "fashion" for her penguin, she is now surfing sites relating to global warming to save the polar bears that are "losing their battle against the damaging effects of our lack of regard for energy conservation, Mom". No longer do her and her girlfriend, Emily, spend hours dressing up their American Girl dolls during playdates.  They just recently spent two hours preparing a flyer to educate others on what they can do to help save the polar bears. Instead of hoping their moms will drive them to the mall to shop at Claire's for earrings on their next playdate, they want me to walk them into town so they can ask the local shops to post their flyers to educate others on the polar bears' plight. As her mom, I am very happy that Joie has discovered "green." As a girly girl myself, she and I can both still stay fashionable in our pink and green outfits while we Reduce, Reuse and Recycle together.