A disturbing trend has begun in our household.  My 3 year-old daughter is becoming a nudist.  The first symptoms began as rare instances when M would somehow end up clothes-less on a random weekend day.  Soon, like the spread of AIDS in an African village, the instances became more and more frequent.  Now, it seems that M somehow ends up stripped down to her panties almost every day after we get her home from school.  The reasons for shedding her clothes range from understandable to complete nonsensical.  For instance, she sometimes spills her drink on her   shirt or dress.  Naturally, she doesn’t want to sit around in wet clothes, so she takes them off.  The problem is that the wet clothes never seem to get replaced with dry clothes…or any clothes.  Instead, she would rather lounge around in Dora the Explorer panties munching goldfish.  If she were a balding, unshaven, beer-bellied man, you would only need to replace those goldfish with a Pabst Blue Ribbon and you would have yourself a textbook example of trailer trash.  I suppose you might need to replace the Dora panties as well…maybe not.

Lately, it’s gotten so bad that if so much as a drop of juice or a smidgen of ketchup hit her clothes, they are off and she is free…I fear that, at the rate we are going, she will have dreadlocks and be living in a tent in the back yard by the end of summer.  Her name will change from Merrit to Moonbeam and she will craft the finest hemp products that she will trade for organic food and non-animal tested-products.  I can still be a proud daddy…

So, I ask you fellow parents, Is this a phase, or is this just the inner hippie in my daughter coming out?  Is this something that all toddlers go through? Embarrassed parents just toss this tidbit into the pile of bones in the closet to save face during those  “look-what-my-toddler-can-do” conversations they have with other parents. You know those conversations with those annoying parents? Mine would go something like this: “Little Jimmy can write his own name and he’s only 6 months old”, says one proud (but lying) parent. I rebut, “Well, my little Moonbeam just fashioned this blanket from the grass clippings in our yard.” 

I suppose in either case, it’s not the worst thing a little girl could do…thank GOD she finally got through her cocaine phase…