One of C’s closest friends is a girl who lives just up the street. They play together every chance they get, and one of their play activities is dress up. C has a whole bunch of costume type things that we’ve accumulated over the years: hats, old jackets, bits and pieces of halloween costume remnants, that kind of thing. His friend, on the other hand, has lots of different princess outfits.

When he’s here, C typically dresses up like a pirate. At her house, however, he loves the princess outfits. Every time I go over there, he’s running around in a dress, or a tutu, or some other such bit of pink silliness.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for letting the little guy relax and play. He is only 4, after all – but I’ve also been trying to encourage more manly pursuits. Rescue Heroes, for example.

To this end, we recently purchased a good collection of manly costumes – a knight outfit, an astronaut jumpsuit, a fireman’s hat and coat, a superman suit, a spiderman costume, and more pirate accouterments.

Okay, so maybe we went a little overboard. In any case, the plan was to send some of these costumes over to his friend’s house. That way when he’s over there, he can enjoy his “boy” costumes while his friend does the dresses.

So, the big day came. He took his costumes over there to play after school. What do you think we found when we went to pick him up?

He was running around wearing the fireman hat and boots – and a pink tutu. “Look, I’m a Rescue Hero princess, momma!”

Sigh.

My only consolation was that his dainty friend was dressed up like a pirate and doing her best to squint one eye and say “Aaarrrghhh!”