My daughter loves to play dress up. She has a trunk full of tiaras, feather boas, scarves, brightly colored cloth, and clothes from around the world. Her love for dress up is well known, and she often gets prefab dress up outfits as gifts. These outfits tend to either look like princesses or drag queens: lots of feathers, sequins and velvet, complimented by shiny plastic shoes with heels just high enough to make a loud hollow smacking sound as she walks. I try to keep it diverse by adding firemen's helmets, chef outfits and other items, but the majority of stuff in the dress up trunk is pretty girlie.

From the time she was born she's always been given lots of frilly dresses and bows. At one point she had so much pink clothing my husband and I declared a Pink Moratorium, insisting that she needed other colors, and fewer dresses. We worried about too much early gender typing, and the dangers of her being too focused on how she looks. She certainly gets a lot of attention when she is in her frills: "You look so pretty in your dress!" "Aren't you adorable!" She is quite a ham, and plays it up when she gets compliments, but we want her to know there is so much more to her than how she looks.

When she was two years old she got a pile of dress up items that included a shiny plastic pink purse, with a row of pink roses at the top. She was playing alone in her room and I kept hearing a little popping noise. I came in and found that she had carefully removed each rose and put them in a neat pile. I was worried she might be upset when she saw they couldn't stick back onto the purse, but she didn't mind. We put the roses inside the bag one by one, and that's where they stay now. I found this incident endearing: a small rebellion against the world of pink. Sometimes little pink roses are just too much.