No shirt, no shoes; no shame

Mabel is a tactile person. She likes textures. Specifically, the thing she likes most is to remove (almost) all her clothing and wrap herself up in my big espresso-brown soft fuzzy blanket. She tends to do this at the most inopportune of moments, though, like right before we have to leave the house to get her brother from school.

For the past week we've had the same problem every day: three o'clock comes and Mabel has no intention of putting her clothes back on. I've dealt with it variously by tossing her (almost) naked self plus blanket into the car and dressing her when we get there, sitting on her to get her dressed (not so successful), or just going with it.

Today I just went with it: she sat cross-legged in the stroller with a crib-size knitted blanket covering her completely, like a cheerful orange shroud. Underneath she was clad in nothing but underpants and a fine layer of black (washable - I'm not stupid) marker, to which she was adding for most of the ten-minute promenade. She poked her head out once or twice, but mostly was content to stay thus concealed while I chatted to my friends, retrieved Dash and our neighbour who we were also getting today, and walked back home.

I had her clothes in the basket underneath, should she have wanted to get dressed. (If she'd decided to set foot out of the stroller, dressing would have been mandatory.) And it is quite mild today, though threatening rain, so I wasn't too worried.

One day last week, though, the school counsellor, who oversees the dispersal of the pupils outside school, was definitely giving me the hairy eyeball as she watched Mabel cavort shoeless and coatless, but perfectly happy, as we waited for her brother. That child should have more clothes; where is her mother?, she was clearly thinking. Then my neighbour arrived and shrugged in my defence: "It's not so cold. I've seen her barefoot in much colder weather." I didn't know whether to be proud or mortified.

But I'm glad Mabel didn't venture out of her blanket today to further scandalize the counsellor. I might have been called in for some counselling of my own.