DD3mos started squirming and fussing as I tried to put on her pjs for bed. I carried her over to her closet and started shuffling through outfits, and she lunged at one and grabbed it. I had no trouble putting it on her. From that moment on we never had any success putting an outfit on her that she hadn't chosen. She had several outfits she'd never wear no matter what, so we stopped clothes shopping without her. We'd hold up outfits, and she'd snatch some (keep) and thrust others away (discard).
By the time she was two, she delighted in picking out my clothes, too.
My big "holy crap!" moment for her emotional sensitivity didn't occur until she was four, because before that I never really saw anything I didn't expect from a little kid (for the record, I always saw the intellectual ability but never the emotional sensitivity... for my wife, this was reversed). I had a day off and I took her out to the end of the driveway to wait for the school bus with her friends. We'd had a very pleasant morning up to this point. I noticed it was chilly, so she needed a coat, and I ducked inside to get it. I just walked up and started helping her into it, and she EXPLODED. I was flabbergasted... all this about a coat??
I wasn't going to let her get on the bus without her coat, but I wasn't going to wrestle her in the street to get it on her, either, so I sent her inside and she missed the bus.
I gave her some time to cool off, then we talked some more, she exploded some more (I probably didn't handle it very well, since this was so completely unexpected and I was so unprepared to deal with it), and after about forty minutes of this I finally blurted out, "I don't know why this is such a big issue. It's just a coat. You can take it off."
And at that final pronouncement, the drama immediately came to an end. The big issue was she thought she'd have to wear it all day.
