I’m pretty sure whoever invented children’s clothes doesn’t have children themselves.
I love dressing the children and making them look their best, but sometimes it takes so much effort to put the clothes on that I’d rather they wore something that you can just pull over their heads.
Take this morning, for example. I put Emilia’s vest on – easy, even putting tights on is fairly easy (easier than I imagined, anyway) but then I got to the dress and it’s just a pain.
Who in their right mind is putting proper buttons on the back of a dress? For starters, they’re tiny buttons meaning the holes to put them in are tiny too. It’s fine for me, I’ve got the patience to sit still while I do my own buttons up, but getting Emi’s done up – nightmare.
Especially nowadays, as all she wants to do is get on the move. So, you’ll start doing the buttons up with her on her front – no no, she wants to crawl. So you pick her up and sit her on your lap – no no, she wants to get down onto the floor, so she can crawl.
Don’t get me wrong, I love that she is getting more mobile, and I would never ever discourage her from developing, but if they even just had pop buttons on the back. Now that, even Rupert could do.
When she was a baby it was relatively easy, vest (three pop buttons), sleepsuit (handful of pop buttons) then pick up and cuddle. But even in saying that, when she was a tiny baby we got some vests I’d not seen before. They popped across her body and then underneath as well. I mean, the vest is a pretty standard design, why do we need to go messing around with it and over complicating it.
With Rupert he’s fairly simple to dress. Nappy, t-shirt, jumper, trousers – the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to get his socks on is down to him though rather than them being a difficult clothing item.
Because we’re not going anywhere smart, he doesn’t have to get shirts on, so he takes about two minutes to dress, but he’s worn them before for occasions and I can tell you it’s not easy to get a shirt on a baby.
Dressing a child when they’re small is very much for the parents. Children, for the most part, don’t care what they’re wearing. If they’re clean, dry and warm (or cool when the weather is warmer) then they’re happy. It doesn’t have to be designer clothing or fancy things that would look a little bit too much on an adult, they have no concept of what looks good and what doesn’t.
Also, kids get messy very easily throughout a day, what is the point in getting them dressed in the complicated, hard to put on, designer outfit only for them to pour their breakfast/drinks/throw up on within five minutes?
The question remains – if clothes are really just for the parents benefit, then why don’t they benefit us when it’s time to get them on?
