For the growing part, every year for the “warm weather clothes” and “cold weather clothes” seasons as I’ve nicknamed them, I go through the children’s drawers. I have to do this because they are still in the “don’t care” age bracket where they are more than happy to put on whatever clothes are in their drawers—regardless of if they are appropriate to the weather for the day. This is true even if they’ve been told the predicted temperature for the day by Alexa or a parent. They will doggedly insist on wearing the overly hot or overly cold clothes, saying they’ll be just fine.
The only way to combat this is to remove the offending, out of season clothing in increments so the children can only go so wrong. For instance, I removed fleece shirts and sweat pants a while back, but long sleeved shirts and long pants were still available. With temperatures in the upper eighties now, those options need to be stored and not brought back until the more temperate days of fall.
I like to go to the children’s used clothing store to get new things for the children. The prices are hard to beat, there is a large, well-organized selection and I can see how the clothes will hold up after washings since they’re pre-worn. Yesterday, I went to get my son some more shorts as his selection was slim and I needed to pull the remaining long pants from his drawer.
I came home with eight pair of shorts and a shirt for him. For my daughter I got six shirts (some with tactile elements), five pair of shorts and an exercise skort like the ones I wear. And I got everything for $69, in and out in ten minutes.
My children get pretty excited about new clothes, which I like because I don’t think I cared much about clothes when I was young. After I showed them their new things, I put things away in their drawers and removed any too-warm items remaining. Clothing-wise, their drawers were now in full-on summer mode.
This morning my daughter found the new exercise skort because she and I had talked about it last night. It was white with a yellow stripe and yellow shorts underneath. She came downstairs wearing the skort saying she wanted to wear that and the new polka-dot shirt to the trampoline place this afternoon with Blake, their sitter.
She headed outside and came in not five minutes later. As I watched her walk past I got up and followed her. Five minutes, maybe ten and there was a dark rust-colored mark right in the center of the back of her skort. A big brown mark—like she’d messed up her pants. Only she hadn’t. She’d been playing with chalk and the rust-colored one which use I’m guessing real red clay to color the chalk, she had sat on.
This is not a rust color that comes out. It’s not a color that even bleaches out. I tried for about twenty minutes with multiple cleaners and I couldn’t get the stain out all the way. This is so typical of my children. They’re messy. But they have fun. And we don’t yell at them for having safe fun outside. I just hope that most of the messes I can get clean. I will never mind having messy children if they’re safely exploring their world and learning.
The Big Boy Update: My son’s hand goes to sleep at night. He must sleep on it or something. We haven’t been able to figure out what causes it. He comes downstairs and has me rub it to help it wake up. Last night he came downstairs and I was apparently very asleep. Apparently he also plunked his hand down on the middle of my stomach which caused me to cry out, waking my husband. I then dropped back onto the bed and was back out asleep, only not completely. I vaguely remember my son correcting his father on how he wasn’t rubbing his fingers in the proper way. It’s actually impossible to get the rubbing correct from what I’ve tried over time, so I just do lots of different things until my son's ready to go back upstairs.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: I remember doing this when I was a child. It felt so comfortable. My daughter was working on a drawing and instead of sitting on a chair, she preferred to prop herself up like this:
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