My youngest will turn seven in just over a week, which is shocking in and of itself. It seems only yesterday that she was appearing here looking like this:

And now she's running around looking like this:

Look at that missing tooth! The other top front one is hanging by a thread and the Tooth Fairy might just do a little bedtime extraction and recovery mission if it doesn't come out soon because it is busgusting.

But this is not a story about the missing tooth, no. It's also not the story of how she got her hand almost broken (but not, so whew!) but the tailgate of my van crashing down on it.

This is a story about a small girl and a pink coat.

See, she's needed a new winter coat for a while, but fall has been mild, and her old coat was still passable, so I thought I'd wait for Christmas to get her a new one. But a few weeks back we were in the mall, and we walked past a store, and she yanked her hand out of mine and made a beeline for a rack of coats just inside the door.

"This is the one. It's so super cute."

"The whaaaa? Whose child are you? Are you SHOPPING?" I was baffled. My kids just wear whatever, mostly. My oldest is starting to have a little bit of a preference, but I've never had a kid that had strong opinions about fashion.

She went to the rack and gestured. "My size, where's my size?" She impatiently tugged at the sleeves. As soon as I moved the properly sized jacket into her grasping hands, she darted to a long mirror and slid her arms into the sleeves. She posed forward and then turned and glanced over her shoulder. Nodding, but not saying much, she slipped the jacket off, and brushed past me to the register, where the teenaged clerk looked on with amusement.

"We're getting this one." My daughter then made a gesture with her hand like, get on with it.

I toddled up to the counter myself, and finding that the coat was on sale, made the purchase. My girl put the coat back on and pranced out into the mall.

She has worn it to school every day since, even when the weather has been too warm for it. The first day, she came home and said "well, I only got two compliments on my jacket."

"Well, that's nice!" I said.

"Tomorrow, I'm going to stand like this:"

And sure enough, the next day, EVERYONE noticed the new coat.