Archive for August 25th, 2006
Buttoning Up
As one of four boys who went to an all-boys school, girls clothing has always been something of a mystery to me, both more detailed and more complex than the straight-forward stuff us blokes get to wear. So it is that this second week of being a stay at home dad has turned out to be challenging in a way I’d not at all expected: dressing my girls.
In the early days, J and I made a conscious decision to dress Evie, Lettie and Jem only in baby grows, as things were difficult enough without adding socks into the equation. And then it started to get warmer and, for months, they wore only dresses. Admittedly, even baby grows can prove difficult. The only explanation I can think of for the poppers not matching up so often, despite carefully aligning before the popping commences, is that, down in Hell, the Devil occassionally checks his watch, and, seeing he has a few minutes before his next set of sinners arrive, smirks to himself as he diverts his attention to the change tables of a few first-time parents across the globe…
But nothing compares to dresses. All those cute, little buttons shaped like love hearts and bunnies were never designed for the big, clumsy, man’s hands God blessed me with. Even if I was dressing a doll, I’d probably need tweezers for some of those things. When trying to do them up on a baby spinning around like Taz… well, maybe the devil designed those, too. For when he hasn’t got time to do the popper thing.
Give me zips and velcro any day. Or, even better, elasticated necks and waistbands.
Of course, elastic is part of the problem on the trickiest bit of clothing of all. Tights. How do you do it? When it takes two hands to hold the leg open wide enough to get a foot to the bottom, where am I supposed to get the hand that holds the baby’s leg from? Let alone the one that keeps her from flipping over and crawling away. And even when I do get one leg in, it nearly alsways comes off while I’m trying to do the other.
So when I took all three of my girls to the supermarket yesterday with tights on under their dresses, I was a bit miffed no one complemented me on the feat I’d achieved. Mind you, the feet on all three sets of tights were pointing backwards…