experiment in styling a 7 year old

last week i may have lost my cool a bit when my daughter had a total melt-down on the floor of her closet - crying and professing she had nothing to wear.  

now let me set the stage a bit ... this is a girl who not only doesn't lack for clothes likely has 2x the amount she really should have for a healthy wardrobe (which i want to work on not buying her so much - but that's another issue).  this is not the first time this has happened - last summer she had a similar melt-down and i had an epiphany {i'm going to let my daughter buy her own clothes} ...surely if she picks them out then she will love them and our mornings will be a smooth as can be ... right???  well not so much!!  

over the weekend i had yet another epiphany {we are gong to go through her closet and pick out outfits that she can wear to school - i'll take pictures of them and then post them in her closet and every morning she can effortlessly pick out an outfit that i know we both have agreed upon}.  can you hear the angelic music playing in my head?  here are some outfits we put together:

i know the reality is that this might last for a week and then she'll complain about what we picked out together or lose the sheets or something ... but i'm going to see if this can restore some sort of calm and peace to our mornings again.  

do you have a willful child that insists on making his or her own fashion statement in the world?  do you have any secrets or tricks to create a compromise in your house?  i'll check back in a bit to see how my little experiment is going.  

-k

p.s.  i know there is some fancy software out there that will do this for me ... but i'm not the most technologically savvy person and this was really easy ... all you need is an iphone, computer with word processing software and a printer to print them out.  i thought about just taking the pictures on the old iphone she uses for music - but i was afraid she would get mad and delete the pictures at some point and then that would lead to another "not so great" parenting moment on my part.  :)