My mother-in-law is a generous gifter, the kind of person who both enjoys the giving and the copious gratitude one pours onto the giver. Two months ago we received a package of identical rainbow t-shirts for the kids made by a rather anonymous company called Mud Kingdom, whose primary point of US distribution is on Amazon. The kids were delighted by the shirts, and put them on immediately, and now it’s hard for me to remember if Julian’s rainbow obsession started pre or post Mud Kingdom shirt.
One might describe the mission of his entire 3.5 year old existence as fixated on seeing and creating rainbows. He makes them from Legos and Magnatiles and math cubes; he organizes his food in rainbow, he eats on rainbow plates, he plays in the rain with a rainbow umbrella. When he gets ice cream, he picks rainbow sherbet or cotton candy, both conglomerations of food dyes that offend me deeply. When he reads books, he looks for pages featuring rainbows. And he wears the aforementioned rainbow t-shirt every day, preferably with a pair of knee-high Bombas / Sesame Street collaboration socks pulled up over his knee caps. (Exact socks no longer available, of course).
The adult concept of the uniform is widely discussed and has its loyalists: it helps reduce decision fatigue, it streamlines your morning routine, it makes you take better care of the clothes you have, and perhaps it helps you invest in higher quality (same) pieces. But, the chosen child uniform is logistically complex to support:
Do we wash the clothes daily and accept that our child is dictating us to a repeat cycle of domesticity that we failed to set a hard boundary on?
Do we buy backups of said rainbow shirt and give into this habit?
When we say, “that shirt is not available” and he has learned to respond, “i’ll just wait for it to get out of the dryer,” do we applaud the resolve or run to the bathroom for a primal scream?
How long will this actually last?
And so on…
Many people will tell you how the battles you once fought or the values you exerted in the early months/years of your child’s life will morph over time. You’ll give in and learn to let go of the outfits you bought with aspirations your kid would actually wear a smocked dress, and you just cook the chicken tenders—again—because it’s what they eat.
Until The Rainbow Phase, my only rule around clothing was that the kids couldn’t wear exactly the same thing they wore yesterday. Low bar, or so I thought. So Julian picked the one sartorial preference that would upend that, gave me the proverbial middle finger, and went forth. I’ve been searching for the apt metaphor for this—the thing that describes how anything you try and control will come back to bite you and reveal that your attempts to control it were both futile and limiting—but it turns out that’s unnecessary. Because it’s just, kinda, that. Plus tiny rainbows everywhere.
Recommendations for the kids
Watch: The Mitchells vs. the Machines (Netflix) is The Incredibles meets Silicon Valley. Katie Mitchell (VO’ed by Abbi Jacobson) is a teen movie/Youtube buff headed to college and her family ends up accompanying her on a road trip en route to college. Chaos ensues. Robots take over. Slightly terrifying but enjoyable for both my three + five year olds.
Read: The Science Comics series is exactly what it sounds like; compendiums of nerd-ery on topics from volcanoes to crows to wild weather. If you need a summer camp add-on, or an AMNH supplement, this 18-book collection will keep your 4+ year old kids busy for a while.
Eat: My kids’ favorite snack is the umami overdose of Nori Make Arare rice crackers (i.e. rice crackers wrapped in seaweed), which I’ve just realized you can buy in bulk from nuts.com. Hallelujah.
Play: Does everyone already know about Wikki Stix, but me? They are these slightly tacky/waxy-but-not-hard-to-clean-up sticks that can be shaped or sculpted into literally anything. Colorful craft meets fidget toy meets art project.
Recommendations for the grown-ups:
Drink: Three years ago I discovered that Negronis are my drink of warm weather, and I’ve never looked back. These St. Agrestis bottled negroni 4-packs are conveniently packable, transportable, and delicious.
Read/Listen: My favorite newsletter-podcast duo of late is Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby, which she describes as “a weekly long-form newsletter about hard-to-describe feelings.” Recent installations I’ve loved include #53 Cope Culture (about how we talk about and label our neuroses/rise of self-help, #50 Beautiful dining chairs (wrestling with buying things / consumption / home decoration), and the one from this weekend, What’s Up With Instagram, which is fairly self-explanatory. (If you subscribe you get the podcasts too, which are also excellent).
Read: I loved last weekend’s Scratch column (by Shaina Feinberg + Julia Rothman) about how Gen Z Teens spend their $
Podcast project: I’m in the early stages of working on a podcast about introversion and looking to talk to introverts, parents of introverts, and partners of introverts (or any combination thereof) for 30 minutes on Zoom. Sign up here if you’d like to take part (or pass it along to a friend.)
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