Little Miss Independent

So..... Our Little Miss is growing up so quickly! Gone are the days when I can choose her clothes each day, help to dress her, put her shoes on, and do pretty much everything for her :-(
She now likes to choose her own clothes and dress herself - which I have no problem with really, just sometimes the clothing combinations can be a little bit questionable - we are trying to teach her about modesty e.g wearing tights or shorts under her skirts, as well as talking about appropriate clothes choices for the weather that day - oh the joys of being a parent.
I love that she is growing up and being independent, but it can drive me a little crazy at times.
To be honest I would really rather do everything for her so that it gets done faster, or its the way I want it etc, but who am I to deny her of learning to make her own choices, and to feel a sense of achievement in the things that she does. I'm an Early Childhood teacher - don't I encourage children to make their own choices and be independent every day? Why should it be any different at home?

So.... I have had to put aside all my OCD's about the way things are done and just 'go with it' - it was really hard in the beginning but now I see how proud she is of herself, even if it takes an extra 5 minutes and I have to clean up twice.
So here's how we 'go with it'....

Every night, Little Miss and I go through her drawers and choose her clothes for the next day.
I then put them at the end of her bed and in the morning she gets up and dresses herself.

Little Miss likes to spread her toast and sandwiches - at first we let her have the whole jar of jam and marjarine, but after all the double dipping and the huge amounts of spreads going onto the toast we re-evaluated, and now we just give her enough to spread her toast - she's happy with that and we're much happier knowing she hasn't licked the knife and put it back in for us to spread our toast with.

Now the breakfast thing..... this is a different story - she puts HUGE amounts of rice bubbles or cornflakes in a bowl with about a litre of milk, so I'm trialling out a new idea....

at night I will put out a bowl with her choice of either rice bubbles or cornflakes, and a spoon, and....

enough milk in a little cup for her to pour over her cereal.
We'll see how this goes. Tomorrow is the first morning.

It only takes a couple of extra minutes to do these things, and the look on Little Miss' face tells me its all worth the extra time.

What things do you do to help your child's independence, or keep yourself from going insane?