A girl needs a lovely purse to complement her outfit

Lila’s nanny, Aida, is determined to make Lila a girly-girl. How else to explain our daughter’s newfound love of carrying a purse around everywhere she goes? I came home from work one day to find her clutching it, and nothing would tear it away. Forget a love of Barbies: I worry that next week I will come home to find her with lipstick and breast implants.

Aida has also started putting a barrette in Lila’s hair, which we love not only because it’s cute as hell, but apparently it is the one signifier that make people register that she is a girl. Dresses, pink pants, flowered shirts…none of them seem to stop people from saying, “Isn’t he cute!” We were recently in a furniture store and a saleswoman said, “Oh, he’s adorable. How old is he?” I replied, “Actually, it’s a she, and she’s 11 months.” The woman apologized, and then, to try to salvage a possible lost sale, leaned down to Lila and said, “I’m sorry! Your mother keeps your hair so short that I couldn’t tell!” Did she think that Lila was the one with the wallet? Because it certainly didn’t endear us to her.


(Why do mommy and daddy always take my picture where dangerous cords float in the background?)


As if warming up for a big one-woman show to be delivered on her first birthday on Sept. 21, Lila seems to come up with a new talent every day. She quickly went from crawling to pulling herself up onto every piece of furniture, and she loves to jerkily walk when we hold her up by her hands. She has also started to babble incessantly, but we noticed last week that in the middle of her usual “deedledeedledeedles” and “duggyduggyduggys,” she was saying an actual word: baby. And as opposed to “duggy,” which is uttered with no relation to a doggy, she was using her new word correctly, while pointing to pictures of herself. And then, this morning, after Christine pointed to the duck, hippo, and cat on her pajamas, and we asked, “Where is duckie?” she pointed to the correct animal, and did the same for the other two. It’s enough to make me forgive her other new talent: lifting Daddy’s shirt up, grabbing two fistfuls of chest hair, and yanking.


(Look carefully for the barrette on the right side of Lulu's head)