If my daughter spoke french (or had ever watched the Muppets) her catchphrase would almost certainly be Qui, moi?! That’s not to say she in any way resembles Miss Piggy, in fact I think it’s fair to say she is a very pretty girl, but she is a confirmed lover of the limelight. In particular, she loves attention from men. She goes up to my male friends and declares her love, and she can bat her eyelids as seductively as any two-year-old Lolita. I dread her teens.

She is, it would seem, a real girly-girl. Not in the sense that she’s not rough and tough; I would go so far as to venture that she’s one of the roughest, toughest children I know. I am often privately smug when people are impressed by her ability to take enormous tumbles, brush herself off, and get right back up again, rarely shedding a tear. I like to attribute it it my particularly lazy style of parenting which means that I tend not to bother running to pick her up every single time she bumps into or falls off something, but, whatever the real reason, she is as tough as the proverbial old boots. No, when I say she is a girly-girl, I am talking more about her focus on the visual aspects of things; the pretty, the glittery, the aesthetically pleasing. She has a certain level of fascination, already, with clothes, shoes, bags, and hair clips. She is delicate and precise in her movements, loving all the small things that are invariably marked as unsuitable for under-threes. At the risk of complete gender-stereotyping, she is obsessively clean, washing her hands thirty times a day and demanding that I wash things like balloons, apples, balls, if they suffer some imagined dirtying. The flirtatiousness is a big part of it too. She responds to men in a way altogether different to how she responds to women. All of this, though, pales in comparison to her fixation with the colour pink. 

I marvel at the way her passion for pink, which is bordering on obsession, has developed despite my efforts from her birth to buy every other colour but pink. I had always presumed it was a myth, a subconscious absorption of parents’ own assumptions, and that my own refusal to comply would negate the process. We all know that until the fifties pink was the standard colour for baby boys, so I had thought that the predilection would be easy enough to overcome, although clearly I was wrong. Apparently scientists now believe that women evolved with a higher sensitivity to pink and red hues as a by-product of their need to be able to distinguish ripe fruits and berries in their role as ‘gatherer’, although personally I think society has a lot more to answer for than our great-great-grandmothers’ penchant for strawberries. Having said that though, I’m not even sure when society would have been able to work it’s insidious spell on her photoreceptors. What little TV she does watch seems fairly gender-neutral to me, but whether it is a result of subliminal advertising, an inbuilt evolutionary side-effect, or simply a personal preference, there can be no doubt that pink is Ruby’s favourite. If given any degree of control she will eat only with a pink fork, play with pink play-doh and draw with a pink pen on pink paper. Thankfully, since she has almost no pink clothes (another symptom of my attempt to override the hard-wiring) she has come to accept that once the couple of pink items are in the laundry basket she will have to make do with what remains. 

Whether this will be something she will outgrow remains to be seen, but I have found it fascinating. I wonder if it’s worth having a boy to find out if the rule applies to blue as well…