Sophie doesn’t like to wear hats. This is because her curls are so voluminous that most kids’ hats don’t fit her. In her young life, her experience with hats has been none-too-positive. Her hair gets caught in them. They’re too tight or too loose. She would rather suffer the freezing cold and turn into a human icicle than wear a hat.
A few weeks ago, however, we found this cozy pink hat. Sophie liked the hat, in theory. ‘Cause it’s pink. But when it came time to actually use it, the fact that it’s pink didn’t give the poor hat any noticeable advantage over all of the other rejects sitting in the closet.
That is, not until we were in the Poconos last weekend and Sophie experienced truly frigid weather for the first time. Suddenly, protesting the hat didn’t make much sense. And over the course of an afternoon, she grew to love the hat.
She grew to love the hat so much that when we were unable to locate it the following morning, she cried and cried. As if a dear pet had died. We went to the hotel gift shop to buy her a new hat. But she hated all of them them. Either they weren’t pink, or they were itchy or just plain ugly. She was stubborn about it, too. We told her no hat, no snow tubing. But she just continued to sob. I told her she could borrow my hat and we bought one of the ugly hats for me to use instead. One day she’ll appreciate the things her parents sacrificed for her.
After shelling out the $10 for the ugly hat, a miracle happened. We retraced our steps to the theater we were in the night before. The cleaning staff had already straightened up and we were told that if they had found the hat it would be in the lost and found. But we had already checked lost and found and it wasn’t there. I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d forever lost my cozy hat to my little girl when, upon exiting said theater, Sophie’s chapeau was sitting on the podium by the door, in all its pink glory.
Cheers all around. And a smiling Sophie, who will never take her pink hat for granted again.
