Give It To Me Straight

Now that Wombat wants to do everything “ALL BY MYSELF”–just like that, in all caps–getting ready to go in the morning is both easier and harder. It’s easier because he’s more amenable to getting dressed when he’s allowed to pick out his shirt ALL BY MYSELF, but harder because he’s not at the point yet where he can also put on his own pants and shoes and then drive the car to daycare, an injustice against which he rails daily and mightily. (It’s only a short drive, but still. Kid can’t parallel park to save his life.)

But pick his own shirt? That we can do. Most of the time he chooses the tops that match absolutely nothing else in his wardrobe, and yet although I like to pretend I have a least some style savvy when I put my mind to it, I’m pretty much over caring how he looks when he goes to daycare. For one, consider how I look when I go to daycare: draped in whatever I worked in and then slept in the day and night before, my hair all scraggly, my eyes half-shut. And then consider how convenient it is that his funky outfit helps distract from his funky self–”funky” as in unwashed, “funky” as in we still haven’t gotten the hang of a regular bathing routine. Anyway, it’s fine by me that he goes out into the world looking like a psychedelic circus clown (especially when the rest of his friends look like that too because they, apparently, are also the all-caps DIY types), and anyway I’ve learned my lesson about daycare outfits: on the off-chance I take him to school looking sharp, something inevitably happens over the course of the day that necessitates resorting to the Pants of Shame, which are always the wrong color, season, style, and size, so, everyone, say it withe me: WHY BOTHER?

BUT! When he’s not at daycare and we’re out and about on a weekend, we style him to the nines (which is admittedly quite easy when you only have to do it once or twice a week). What’s not easy, though, is keeping him in cool clothes when he grows out of them so fast. (Four inches in the last six months, people. FOUR. INCHES.)

Like a desperado, waiting for the flood.

But fear not. The Gap has denim for toddlers, and thanks to them and BlogHer, Wombat, with god as his witness, will never go short-trousered again!

Click here to read all about it (or to just look at the pretty, pretty pictures) and to also, you guessed it, enter for a chance to win a hundred smackers. (Note: The post was written as a stand-alone for the Gap1969 website, where it will be appearing…sometime? soon?…, so if is a little repetetive, that’s why.)