I believe in bows.

As soon as I found out that my baby would be a girl, I started buying bows.  While I know that some people find it obnoxious, unnecessary, or inappropriately role-defining, I just can't help but love bow-headed little girls.  And Sara has turned into (most days) a girl who won't leave the house without a bow upon her sweet head.  But for all the bows and dresses and frilly clothes that Sara wore as a baby, she hasn't been defined by such items.   As you know, she fell hard early on for Thomas the Train, Batman, Superman, and other so-called boy toys.

I have never fought Sara's obsession with trains and superheroes.  What would have been the point?  For the longest, she wanted only to wear Thomas pajamas, and we let her.  When she wanted a Batmobile for Christmas, she got one.  She kept wearing bows and dresses happily, but her heart belonged to toys that wouldn't fall under the traditional girl category.  People told me that my daughter was a tomboy, some in tones that indicated I should do something about it.  I didn't, and as it turns out, I didn't need to.

One day about six or seven months ago, Sara woke up and decided she was a princess.  A princess who loves her some Thomas, mind you, but a princess nonetheless (she wants a Green Lantern and dress-up for Christmas).  This notion intensified with our trip to Disney, and has only grown by leaps and bounds since.  And all of this happened without any prompting or encouraging on my part.  She is programed, after all, as a girl, and right at about two-and-a-half, the princess built into her DNA magically kicked in. 

Now it's princess dresses, princess bedspread, princess curtain, princess dolls, princess tea sets and t-shirts and panties and everything else you can imagine.  It's like a little princess heaven in our playroom.  I laugh to myself at how much Sara has changed in her three short years, and how she seems to have adopted a love for certain things for no other reason than that she's a girl and, well, that's just what girls do. 

When I was pregnant with my little girl, I had visions of a princess in my head.  And now a princess is exactly what I have, in the flesh.  Could it have been the bows?  It must have been the bows.