My name is Cartside and I let my daughter sleep in a blue cot

As Snowflake gets older we're slowly but surely passing on all things baby stuff. I'm not one to just throw things out, most items are in perfect condition and I could never just bin it, so I try my best to find someone who could make use of it.

This has led to the odd chuckle.

I must be a really bad mum. Imagine, I let my girl sleep in a blue cot. Oh my. And I prevented her from falling out of the bed with a blue bed guard. Oh the shame. (I still live in hope that there's redemption for me because both were actually hardly used at all.)

Now, I'm totally resigned to the choices my girls make, and Cubling is pink ballerina princess incarnate. We have so much pink in the house it makes me sick. But it's ok I tell myself (although I'm very tempted to rid ourselves of the chair with her name on it that says "I want to be a ballarina, pop star, stewardess, nurse), she loves pink and is just a lot more girlie than I ever was. Thankfully her sister happily declares she's a boy because she's George and her big sister is Peppa. That's fine too, I quite like to pretend I've got one each occasionally.

But it seems that I live in a land where pink and blue aren't optional but compulsory. You mustn't dress your girl in anything not pink. You mustn't use any toy that is not pink. You mustn't use a blue cot. A colleague introduced her new baby girl who was dressed in something blue and everyone assumed it was a boy. It wasn't baby blue, it was a colour that to me didn't shout out boy and I'd never have made a gender assumption based on the colour of that outfit, so much so that I noticed the various people surrounding her that did call the baby "he".

You see, I'm trying to sell or give away the stuff and have offered things to people desperate for them, only to be told, sorry I have a girl so was really looking for something pink?

People of the kind responding to my gumtree and netmums adverts, I have 2 (TWO) girls and I'm sick to the bone of pink, I promise you your daughter will not even notice they are sleeping in a blue cot or are kept inside the bed by a blue bed guard. I'm not just being terrorised by my older daughter now, but also by fellow mums who I would have thought would be as tired of the omnipresent pink as I was. It's a pink army out there, I tell you.

I mean, I'm really not trying to make a point of clothing my girls in neutral stuff. They wouldn't wear it. I'm not radical and totally ride the wave of my girls' preferences which very often are pink to my dismay. But I'm really surprised that fellow mums have subscribed to the pink marketing to this extend. Welcome to the kingdom of pink. By extension, how can we expect our daughters to choose anything other than what offer them in the pink world of toys and equipment. They will go for the fluffy pink underpaid and undervalued jobs, eventually realising that those don't pay enough to justify staying in work only to become financially dependent and end up on low pensions, on benefit or in low income, insecure jobs. They will choose to want to become nurses rather than doctors and stewardesses rather than pilots. Then have children and leave the job market. And so we perpetuate the gender pay gap and gender inequality, as well as the outcomes of our next generation because maternal education levels are the single most important indicator of educational outcomes of children.

Brave new world that has such pink people in it.