Accessories.

There is a distinct privilege to being a child: you can do weird things and nobody thinks twice about it. You can dress weird, act weird, carry weird stuff around with you, it's all good.


For instance, you can wear tights and a sundress in February and top it off with a bike helmet; voila! Why the hell not.

And when you sit down for a snack with your buddies, why not throw on a knight's chain-mail hood? It really accentuates the blue embroidery on your Winnie-the-Pooh dress.

I know kids aren't the only people who do these types of things. Hell, you see people pushing their tiny dogs around in strollers or wearing their (backwards) bike helmets while they shop for their groceries or buy shoes. And a lot of much, much stranger things. 

But this isn't meant to single grown-ups out for the funny things they do, it's meant to exalt the carefree beauty of being a child; that unmarred sense of "I am what I am because it's all I know to be." 

...a sense that we, ironically, lose somewhere between childhood and adulthood and then work very hard to find again: that place where just being "us" is all we need.

You can be sure that not a single kid at that table even noticed Sonja's chain-mail hood, and even if they did, they wouldn't have thought it was weird, they would just wish they had one too.