big gel. smaller gel.

I remember reading british stories as a wee lass and laughing over the cockney pronunciation of girl: "Gel". Now that's what Lucy says:
"Ucy. Big Gel."

Unless when I want her to do something that is, as I tell her, what Big Girls do, and she doesn't want to do it, she shakes her head and says, "Smaller Gel."

I guess it's all relative.

Anyway, this Big Gel of mine is wearing undies. Some have little dancing fairies on them, some frogs and dogs and cats, some sport Elmo or Zoe (We avoid the merchandising, but in the interest of being out of diapers sooner and smoothing the transition, I will apparently sell my daughter to Sesame Workshop).

For any of you who have been reading for a while, we've done a whole "diaper-free" but with diapers thing, and then backed precipitously away from that, then pulled our hair out, then wrote an essay about it here, then started going diaperless again when the fancy struck, then said screw it, not worth it but let Lucy run naked all summer and sighed over how complicated pottying can be, how much patience and flexibility it requires for us parents, and then suddenly, she's pretty much done.
Done.
Can't decide if she's a Bigger Gel because she's almost done or a Smaller Gel because the undies are just that ridiculously tiny. And because sometimes she wears them like a belt--a very tight belt with two legs wedged into one tiny leg hole.
Bigger? Smaller?
Perhaps part of me is hoping that she'll stay smaller just a tiny bit longer, so that she'll be My Gel, small or large.