Pretty In Pink

Adelay, just for the record, is not always a girly-girl. She loves to run and wrestle with Daddy, and is very good at kicking and throwing balls. One of her favorite things to do is drive her truck around the house. That said, I need to express my mounting annoyance in regard to her TOTAL OBSESSION with all things pink.
She has shown a preference for the shade since even before she could verbally identify it, and now that she can, we never hear the end of pink. At our church about a month ago, they had a slumber party for all the girls, and one of the activities was nail painting. Well, I made the mistake of letting- nay, ENCOURAGING!- her to get her fingernails done. Of course she chose the pink bottle of polish, and of course, she soon discovered that I had a bottle of pink polish hidden away in our bathroom at home. So now she must have her nails, fingers AND toes, painted pink at all times. If it begins to fade or chip, she notices, and demands, wiggling her hands urgently in my face, "Pink! Pink!"
She also has what borders on a fetish about pink socks. The last time I replenished her sock drawer, I bought about ten pairs, and two were pink, one dark and one light. It was then that Adelay became suddenly aware of the existence and importance of socks in her universe. The importance, specifically, of their color. Every day when I got her dressed, she began to run to the sock drawer and search frantically for the pink socks. If they were dirty, I had to talk her off a ledge. I finally wised up and just bought a whole crapload of pink socks. Problem solved, right? Except that now she suffers pangs of horror every time she changes clothes, because she cannot bear to banish a perfectly good, perfectly PINK pair of socks to the hamper, no matter how grubby they might be.
This morning this whole obsessive-compulsive tendency came to a head. We were seriously late for Kindermusik, and I was trying my best to get the whole dressing process finished without sounding like a stuck record of a song called, "Hurry Up." But as usual, the more I tried to light a fire under Addy, the slower she wanted to move. It came to the sock exchange- I pulled off the dirty ones, threw them in the basket, and put on a clean pair. Simple enough. Until the child wrenched herself from my grasp and fell to her knees before the clothes basket, weeping actual tears and sobbing incoherently about "The pink! The pink!"
I thought maybe she was upset because I hadn't let her throw the dirty pair in the hamper herself, something she loves to do. So I pulled them out and handed them to her. Still she wept, and began to root through the basket, flinging every item of clothing onto the floor, searching for some imaginary pair of pink socks. Snot and tears were running all over her face, and I couldn't understand anything she said. Every attempt I made to talk to her or physically remove her from the situation was met with hysteria. It was seriously like a scene out of a mental institution or something. A sock induced nervous breakdown.
I finally just worked around it, putting on the rest of her clothes and brushing her hair as she screamed and flailed. She didn't stop talking about the friggin' socks until we pulled into the parking lot of the Kindermusik location.
She has also of late developed a passion for (shudder) Barbie. Not that she plays with the actual dolls, but she has a Barbie movie, "Barbie as Rapunzel," which she loves with the whole of her little pink loving heart. Almost every morning she wakes up requesting to watch Barbie, and we have had to institute a "one showing of Rapunzel a day" rule. When we tell her, "no more Barbie," she grows sober and grief-stricken. "No mo Bah-bie," she will murmur softly to herself, staring at the TV sadly.
If only this were so.