Tidbit Tuesday — Uniforms

I gave my 9-month-old Remy a uniform last week during my stay-at-home time. I didn’t really think about it, it just happened.

Charity’s job was pulling her in early so I was the one that got Remy up to feed and change his diaper in the mornings. The Wednesday night before my first stay-at-home day Charity put him in the pajamas pictured above. These aren’t official pajamas mind you, just the first two pieces of clothing pulled from a laundry basket that were not jeans.

The beauty of this attire lies in the pants, which come with built-in socks. Kid socks are my nemesis. They are the Hans Gruber to my John McClane of parenting. If I could gather all Remy’s mismatched, multi-sized socks and push them off the 30th floor of the Nakatomi building, I would. The only problem with that is, I can’t gather all the socks because all I can ever find, after hours of searching, is one—or sometimes two, and the oversized one sporting the Rescue Bots logo might be mine.

Usually, at some point during the day, I end up changing Remy out of his pajamas and into something more daytime. I don’t know why. It’s not like he’s a sweaty adolescent that hasn’t had the “deodorant talk” yet. He’s still a fresh human that has some serious olfactory hang time. I bet infants can go a whole month without bathing and be just fine. Changing his clothes is a problem though because we aren’t laundry wizards. Well we do laundry, we just rarely fold and put it away. Like clothes-washing anarchists. Dressing my children is essentially me sniffing through baskets of clothes—because after a while you forget which piles are clean and dirty—looking at the tag numbers, and trying to match tops and bottoms with my children’s ages. I look for every opportunity to avoid this chore.

This must have been the track my subconscious ran upon. Charity worked into the evening on that Thursday and me and the kids met her at our church for band rehearsal. The first thing she said when Remy and I waltzed in was, “He’s still in his pajamas?” Sure enough, his attire had not changed. Or more accurately, I had not changed his attire. There he was, in public, looking like a militarized Oompa Loompa.

I shrugged my shoulders at her question because for me it was a win. For me, I didn’t have to spend twenty minutes rifling through piles of clothing looking for a top, a bottom, and two socks the size of a postage stamp. The twenty minutes I saved were a gift, and no one can take that from me.

Putting Remy to bed that night was a piece of cake; he was already in his pajamas. In fact all of Friday, was a piece of cake too as he remained firmly in his “Rambo the Trapeze Artist” getup. If it ain’t broke…am I right?

I’ve heard that some successful people, owners of giant corporations for example, wear the same clothes everyday. Their wardrobes have all the variance of that of a cartoon character. It is one less thing for them to worry about and it frees up headspace for more important things. I feel this may be true for kids. Or more importantly, parents. Rolling into Saturday afternoon I held up my 9-month-old, “Deer Hunting Mario Brother”, and marveled at all the headspace I had. 72-hours of him in the same onesie and socked-pants did me good. 72-hours of not searching for clothes and twin Hans-Gruber-foot-coverings made my life so much easier.

Then my wife went and ruined the streak by changing him into something else. I’m not sure what her reasoning was.

For all of the Von Trapp dad’s failings he got one thing right.

Uniforms.

(smiling optional)