Disturbing Phone Call(s)

I was in Toronto last week for a couple days.

My daughter can finally call me on the phone! Well, she needs Nanny Mimi to dial for her (Rowan, The Dictator, is not some crazy genius) but she liked to call me - and often. I loved it.

But I received a very disturbing phone call, while I was away, from Nanny Mimi one afternoon. "Rowan really likes this hat that she saw on another classmate and she wants it," Nanny Mimi told me.

I immediately felt my stomach drop. I knew it was going to happen, but I didn't think it would happen this soon. I mean, Rowan is only three! She's not thirteen!

I get that 13 year-olds may want to dress like their friends. But a three-year old?

Ok, I admit, I missed Rowan a ton while I was gone and I do, like every mother, want my child to be happy - at any cost. Well, almost any cost.

This did not sit with me well at all. I do not want Rowan to want to wear what other girls wear. Especially not so soon.

But because I had mother guilt for leaving her and apparently Rowan really really wanted this hat and it was only a hat from Old Navy, I told Nanny Mimi to go forth and purchase the hat.

Well, i got a phone call back that Old Navy was out of these hats. Nanny Mimi had went and she couldn't find them. She asked me if I would go to Old Navy in Toronto and find this hat.

To which I said, "I so don't have the time." (Really, I barely had time to eat lunch while I was there and there's not an Old Navy just down the street. Anyway.)

I told Nanny Mimi that Rowan doesn't need the same hat as Other Girl in her Nursery school, but she could take Rowan anywere else to buy any hat she wanted. (Which also made me a tad sick, because Rowan already has 8 hats.) But mother guilt. It will kill you.

I got off the phone and thought, "Hmmm. Maybe I should call my mother and ask her to go to the Old Navy near her house and buy Rowan the hat." Then I thought, "NO!!!! This is so not a precedent I want to start. I do not want Rowan thinking this is all ok."

So I forgot about it. Until Nanny Mimi called me again the next day to tell me gleefully that she finally found the hat. "Oh great!" I said.

"Yes, Rowan is so happy," she told me.

"Great!" I said again, thinking, "This is not sitting with me well at all."

Rowan called me later. I asked her if she liked her new hat. And you know what she said to me?

She said, "I love my hat. It's the same one as Rebecca's and Gabriell's at my school."

"Great!" I said, thinking. "Oh, god, no!!!"

Honestly, it's too young for this to all start. It's. Too. Young.

But how do you explain to a three year-old that it's not cool to want something just because her friends have it? I swear, I thought I'd have another 8 years before this all started.

Experienced mothers, please share....