Ronan at the beach in Florida, wearing hat, sunglasses, onesie,
overalls, diaper, and some 40 SPF Sunblock from Australia
that is the only organic baby sunblock in the world. And it's free!*
A pox upon all the houses of baby clothes designers. I swear to God that those baby jumpers have special magical powers, so that at 3 AM, when you’re changing your baby, those things have one extra clasp or snap or button that you have to figure out in the dark while your child lies screaming on the changing table because, damn it, just feed me already.
I think it should be a requirement for all designers to actually use their designs with a child before announcing their Fall line. Some of the clothes Ronan wears are awesome – I marvel at how useful they are for parents, which is my only serious criteria – and some I wonder if the designers hate children, but especially hate their parents. Let’s face it, the more complicated your outfit is, the more complicated it is to take it off to change the diaper.
Some designers apparently have children that are born potty-trained. I know this because their clothes do not, under any circumstances, come off when you need them to. However, often they will come off when you don’t want them to, which is especially true of footwear. The baby clothes police will kill me for this, but I’m going to reveal that each item has a chip which senses how frustrated the parent is, and will either lock on to the child or loosen depending on what you want to happen. The clothes chip will do the opposite of whatever you want. The chip was designed by the Mordor© Corporation, a subsidiary of Halliburton.
While I’m quite comfortable flouting the evil that is Halliburton, I cannot explain how clothes have an extra button in the middle of the night. It’s like the clothes are designed by Loki, who just whoops it up watching you button and rebutton the damn sleeper again and again.
And Satan himself designs those snaps. Parents everywhere reading this are collectively shuddering at the thought of those damned-to-hell snaps that children’s clothes come with. Those Herculean snaps that require a sledgehammer to close, and then open within thirty seconds of picking up your kid, exposing his diaper to the world.
I’m sure there’s a designer or two reading this, thinking, yeah, but what about those parents who cram a 12-pound baby into a onesie designed for a nine-pounder? Or those those parents who want everything, snaps that work and hold when they are supposed to and release when they’re not? Well, I counter with children’s clothes labels: the suggestion. If you have purchased anything, even adult clothes, it seems that sizes are widely open to interpretation. Ronan is wearing, comfortably mind you, some onesies labled for newborns. Other onesies for 6-9 months will fit him sometime in college. (He’ll enjoy reading that line when he’s older.) There doesn’t seem to be rhyme or reason, it’s not like the same clothes from one country or one manufacturer share the same sizes, it’s just whatever you get, the size is consistent for that garment, and only that one. There is no Dana; only Zuul.
Okay, I admit Ronan is probably not wearing possessed clothes, but it’s amazingly frustrating, when you didn’t want to get in the first place, to stumble over to the changing table and be confronted first, with snaps that don’t’ open, then a diaper full of poo, then snaps that won’t close, and when you do get them closed, there’s one extra and you have to start over again. All of this has to be done in such a way that Ronan doesn’t fully wake up and demand food. Which of course, means that by the time I’ve changed him, attempted to put him back to sleep, and woken Terry up to deal with it and actually get him to sleep, I’m wide awake, and now I lie in bed staring at the ceiling cursing the damned clothing manufacturers for not coming up with some snaps that work and don’t multiply in the night.
While Terry is actually staying up and feeding Ronan. That’s my contribution, the cursing.
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*The sunblock is not free. It’s unbelievably expensive.