Colors and Clothing and Choices

Below is a picture of Riley in his new shirt. He actually picked out this shirt by himself when we were in Target this morning. He spotted it on the rack, grabbed it and walked over to me and said "Look it, my shirt. Peas Mama"

How could I not buy it for him?

But I have to confess some mixed feeling about Riley having opinions and preferences on clothing. So far he has been fairly easy to get dressed. With the exception of overalls, he is happy to wear anything or nothing. I don't think that I can handle two picky kids in the morning

Megan is a different story all together. We have solved many of the clothing battles by insisting that she pick out her clothes the night before. But every once in a while we have to have a 20 minute battle, complete with tears, about clothes in the morning.

This week and next week are "color days" for all the Kindergartners at Megan's school. The children are supposed to wear clothes that match the color of the day. The novelty of the project got us through the first two days (yellow and orange) but by Wednesday (red) the strain was starting to show. And we went through Megan's wardrobe, it was clear that while she wanted to participate in color days, she didn't actually want to wear anything red.

Today, green day, was awful. She found a green t-shirt that she wanted to wear, but she didn't want to wear her green shamrock pants. She didn't want to wear pants at all. Which was fine, except she also didn't want to wear a skirt. She didn't want anything on her bottom half.

The green t-shirt she found is a little big for her, I think it is a girls size 6, and it hits her at the tops of her thighs. For that reason, she decided that it was really more like a dress. And you don't have to wear pants (or skirts) with dresses.

There was much crying and outrage as Bryan and I explained and insisted that Megan could not go to school half naked. At one point I was able to wrestle a pair of pants on on her body - thinking that if she were clothed, we could at least leave the house, and maybe she would get over it. Pretty naive, huh? The pants came off with a speed that was the inverse to the effort taken to get them on her.

Finally I was able to track down real dress with that happened to have green rickrack trim on it. Megan deemed it acceptable and we were able to get to school on time.

But it mornings like this that make me long for school uniforms. And it goes without saying that I can not wait for color days to be over.