Expressing Herself Through Fashion

After our trip to the music store, we headed out to get our girl some new school clothes and her school supplies. This child is growing like a weed -- at least her feet are... None of her shoes from last year fit her! We bought a new pair of sneakers at Target -- purple Converse, so she is very excited about that! (Pink is "dead" to her -- it's all about purple this year...) We actually started at Justice which is her favorite store. They have some cute things but their prices add up quickly (in spite of the "40% off the entire store" which seems to be every day... so, clearly, their prices are marked up 40%...) so I told her that we would get a few things and then head to Target. I have to say, she and I have not always seen eye-to-eye on what is appropriate and stylish for a girl her age, but she's developing her own style and I think it's cute and classic. She loves plaid this year, and argyle. And she LOVES skirts and dresses -- hates jeans.

At Justice, she picked out a cute dress that looks like a black & white hounds-tooth pleated skirt with a black sweater vest and short-sleeved white shirt underneath. There is a thin, blue ribbon "belt" around the top of the skirt (although the whole thing is one piece) and we picked out matching blue leggings to wear underneath that. She also picked out a blue pleated skort and another dress that looks like a short-sleeved navy sweater with a pleated skirt underneath. We picked out some navy leggings to go under that, or she would even wear jeans underneath when it gets colder. We saw an adorable jean dress at Justice that was about $25, and it was not in her size. Happily, when we went over to Target, we saw an equally cute jean dress that she liked even better and we bought it for $15! We also found a solid-colored, ruffle skort at Target that matched a t-shirt we bought at Justice. The skort only cost us $5!

I let her pick out a few things that really "spoke" to her personality -- specifically, 2 t-shirts with sayings on them. She has a real thing for French culture -- not even sure where it came from, but she's always trying to throw French words into sentences and she loves "Les Miserables", etc... Anyway, in Justice she saw a cute t-shirt that had a woman walking a French poodle on it (she loves dogs) and it said "Tres Jolie" (very pretty) on it -- she loved it! In Target, she picked out a t-shirt that says "Join Our Rally to Save the Earth" -- she loved that, especially since she has formed a club that she calls the "Clean Up Club" through which she is trying to encourage her friends to recycle and to pick up litter in their town.

The best part of our shopping trip? Standing in Justice and having my girl tell me that it was ok that we were only buying a few things there, because she doesn't want to look exactly like everyone else at school -- she wants to have her own style! Yay, her!