Amalia Fashionista Accessorizes

Since  she passed her second birthday and moved from Miami to Manhattan, granddaughter Amalia has revised and refined  her fashion vibe. 

 Leaving the bikinis and sundresses behind, she’s transformed her wardrobe for winter in the Big Apple.  And like Coco Chanel, whose ever-present pearls are an inspiration, Amalia believes, “The ability to accessorize is what separates us from the animals.”

Like many New Yorkers, Amalia often wears black.

Especially when working with penguins --one of her favorite animals.  She often visits them at the Central Park Zoo.)

This brown outfit needed something to make it pop—she decided to add her lime green owl backpack.

For eating a mini-cupcake in a diner, she wore her shiny red Minnie Mouse boots and a white hooded jacket.

She has to pick the right workout clothes for Tuesdays (hip-hop dance class) and Thursdays (yoga) at the nearby store “Sprout.”

This outfit was a favorite of her yoga partner.

For a casual Sunday brunch, she picks her cozy Hello Kitty robe, Dora socks and her favorite baseball hat—worn backwards.

Fake glasses add a note of gravitas when you’re playing doctor.

A new Poochie Purse inspired her “Snow fun” top and multiple necklaces.

For working on her I-Pad, Amalia chose black galoshes and her cupcake-topped tutu, but she felt there was something missing.

Her old faithful Dora baseball cap!

This outfit, with the matching knitted leggings, needed no embellishment

For baking and eating Valentine cookies, she picked her LOVE shirt with a heart on it.

Choosing the right purse for an outfit is critical.

Watching Dora videos on Yiayia’s computer called for some butterfly wings and a tutu, along with her penguin top.

On Valentine’s Day,  Amalia baked heart cupcakes and entertained Uncle Bob and Auntie Robin in a black outfit with hearts and a hat worn backwards for a cloche effect.

Last week’s storm, which caused havoc in New York, prevented some child models from getting to a photographer’s studio in the building where her Mommy works, so Amalia was pressed into service for a catalogue shoot. 

Here she is getting ready in hair and make-up.

She liked the outfit they put on her, but if she were accessorizing the photo shoot herself, she would have added a poochie purse and a baseball cap—backwards, of course!

Amalia Accessorizes

Always precocious, Granddaughter Amalía, almost 15 months old, announced her early entrance into the Terrible Twos with a complete melt-down screaming tantrum while riding in rush-hour traffic through downtown Miami several nights ago.  The reason for the tantrum: she hated the shoes her Mommy had put on her (black Mary Janes.)  The only solution was to hide the offending shoes and let her go barefoot for the rest of the night, since alternate shoes were not available.

After three children and one grandchild, I realize that a baby’s personality is the result of nature, not nurture.  Just as my daughter Eleni got blue eyes from her mother and the won’t-eat-cream-sauces-but-loves-spicy-foods gene from her father, Amalía was born with the expert-at-accessorizing, crazy-about-shoes gene from her Mommy. 

 As soon as she started walking, around ten months old, she insisted on having a purse slung over her arm every time she went out.  If there was no purse handy that coordinated with her outfit, anything that resembled a purse—say a spare shopping bag with handles—would be drafted into use.

 Another essential accessory, one that didn’t even exist when my kids were young, was the cell phone.  Toy cell phones didn’t entertain Amalía for long—she quickly learned how to snatch Mommy’s phone when she wasn’t looking to call Yiayia and Papou.  If they didn’t answer, she’d leave a voice mail (“Hola!  Hola!”)

 But THE accessory, the one that fascinates Amalía wherever she goes, is shoes (which she calls “patos” for “zapatos” since she’s speaking more Spanish than English at the moment.) Even at eleven months old, as we sat in the airport to fly to Greece for summer vacation, Amalia walked around to fellow passengers checking out everyone’s footwear.  This man on the left below offered to trade shoes with her, but she realized her shoes wouldn’t fit him.  The silver pair in the middle photo served well throughout Greece and the pink ones with flowers are the ones she wanted to wear in Florida instead of the solemn black ones that brought on the fearful tantrum,

 Below you see her in the late, lamented “Hello Kitty” sparkly silver shoes that were such a hit in Nicaragua, but one of the pair went AWOL in the new H&M store in South Beach Miami.  The lone survivor will be decking my “shoe tree” come Christmas.

 Halloween, when she wore a ladybug costume, posed a perplexing accessorizing challenge.  You can see that she’s not sure the black cat purse was the right thing for a ladybug ensemble, but the ladybug shoes (sent by her honorary Yiayia Eleni)  were perfect.  The distressed look on Amalía’s face is because  she HATED the antennae on the ladybug costume, (Why do my parents want to dress me like a bug?), but her cooperation was won when baby-sitter Maria José bribed her with a cookie.

 One day in Miami Beach, when one of her Mommy’s strappy green flowered espadrilles broke,  there was an emergency stop at a Parade of Shoes store and Amalía thought she’d died and gone to heaven.  Aisles of shoes, and most of them within reach!  She raced up and down, dragging shoes to show Mommy, sure she would buy them all, but in the end, everything was returned to its spot in the display.

At Thanksgiving at Yiayia and Papou’s house in Grafton, MA, Amalia got her first taste of frosty days and Mommy-and-me knitted dresses and tights from Hanna Andersson.  She made up for the lack of a matching bag with a little yoyo that came out of her holiday cracker, and she even  seemed happy with the afore-mentioned black Mary Jane shoes, because they looked like Mommy’s. 

 Next accessorizing challenge: Christmas.  I have a feeling she’s not going to agree to the reindeer horns.  But she did see some gold, fur-lined boots at Target...