Man vs. Baby Page 15

  WARDROBE

  When Charlie was about four months old, I remember one night trying to dress him for bed. After ten minutes of struggling, I shouted to Lyns for help. And as she peered around the nursery door, I complained that the new sleepsuit/grow-bag things she’d bought were faulty and would probably need to be returned. It took Lyns about a second to work out that the item of clothing wasn’t faulty at all, and a further second to realize that I’d spent the previous ten minutes trying to dress Charlie in a pillowcase. “You’re a moron,” she patiently explained. Charlie raised one eyebrow in agreement.

  The disappointing thing about this episode was that, at this point, I thought I had started to “get it.”

  I’d begun to understand things like turn-over scratch sleeves and “envelope necks” (this is a design of onesie that means you can remove it by pulling it downward, rather than over the baby’s head—so if there’s shit on the onesie, you can take it off without coating his face in it). But the pillowcase incident was a reminder to not get too cocky, that there is always something new to learn. And if you don’t keep up, one day your kid will end up sitting in his baby sensory class wearing bedding.

  A lot of threads

  The sheer volume of clothing a baby can get through is a shock. Before the birth, you buy them more clothes than they could possibly ever wear. And then they get through them in no time at all. This is partly because, as we’ve already covered in graphic and nightmarish depth, babies expel fluids at a fairly constant rate, so they need changing a lot. But it’s also because they grow exponentially. Older parents say it all the time: that their kids grew in the blink of a wistful eye. That one minute their little one was crawling, the next he was six feet tall and being brought home by police after being caught smoking weed on the hood of his friend Dean’s car. (Sorry, Mom.)

  But they never grow faster than in those first few months. Babies grow at an insane rate during this time, outpacing the speed at which you can wash or buy clothes. In the first six months, they double in weight, and by the time they’re one year old they are one and a half times taller than when they first arrived. To put that in perspective: if they continued to grow at that same rate as they got older, by the time they were ten years old they would be twenty-two yards tall. Which is about the same height as the BFG or a small apartment building. (Try buying clothes for your child then. Even Big and Tall doesn’t cater to that level of freakery.)

  So imagine how many clothes you would need if you doubled your waist size every six months and doubled in height every couple of years. Oh, by the way, as if you could forget, you shit yourself three times a day. It’s a lot of duds.

  Given how many clothes they get through, and how expensive it can be to keep up, when shopping for an item of baby clothing, a parent’s priorities must always be the same: How much is it? Is it machine-washable? How long will it last? How easy and quick is it to get on and off?

  And, once you’re aware of those priorities, you do what everyone else does: ignore them and buy expensive, impractical shit that your baby looks cute in.

  Fashion

  When it comes to items of baby clothing, practicality is always secondary to whether or not a baby will look cute in it. And the fashion industry has either caught on to or driven this demand. Of course, babies are too young to have a preference for any particular fashion themselves, so we imprint our own style onto them. With Charlie, you can tell at a glance who has dressed him that morning. If Lyns has dressed him, he will look preppy and smart; if I’ve dressed him, he will be dressed as Batman.

  But this tendency we have to imprint our own tastes and interests onto our children’s wardrobes leads to criticism. Just recently, I read an article about how new parents are supposedly treating their children as “vanity projects.” The writer argued that, by choosing clothes according to our tastes and interests, we are treating our children as no more than accessories to be embellished to gratify our own egos. First, I think that’s quite a miserable view to take, and second, I just don’t think it’s true. When we dress a baby according to our own tastes or buy them a Spider-Man outfit, a football jersey, or a sloganed T-shirt that reflects our sense of humor, I don’t think we’re accessorizing them. In fact, I think we’re defining our son or daughter as an important member of our tribe, and I think that’s a positive thing, rather than something to be discouraged and made to feel like a dick about.

  But maybe we also dress our children in things we can’t get away with wearing ourselves. Stuff that as adults we would like to wear, if only the world weren’t such a judgmental, boring, and piss-on-your-chips kind of place.II Thanks to my lifelong obsession with comic books, Charlie is often dressed in superhero garb or as a storm trooper, but maybe it’s only the rules of social conformity that stop me from going into work each day dressed the same.

  Also, I suspect that when some women (and maybe some men) are purchasing a princess- or ballerina-inspired outfit for their three-month-old little girl, there is a small part of them that is wishing that they lived in a world in which they could wear something just as magical (without being committed). Even if this “vanity project” theory is true, I still think it’s really unfair to say that we’re treating babies as accessories. By dressing them in these cheery, wondrous ways, it is much more like we are dressing them without constraint. With simple fun.

  But, as in all things, there are those people who have all the common sense of a doorknob. People who miss the point and take things too far, and who should be discouraged from dressing themselves, let alone their innocent infants.

  100% Bitch

  I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office a while ago and noticed a little girl about the same age as Charlie, sitting in her stroller wearing a onesie with a slogan emblazoned on the front that read: “My mom’s the Queen Bitch, and I’m her princess.”

  Okay, far be it from me to question the clothing choices of royalty. But it strikes me as one thing to express your own personality through the clothing your kid wears, and quite another when you have a personality that celebrates being ignorant.

  The definition of bitch is:

  [bich] noun: a lewd, immoral, malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman—sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse

  Reading that definition, I find it utterly baffling that you would celebrate this as a character trait, let alone proudly display that trait across your innocent child. (I looked up to see what kind of parents would do something like that. I wasn’t that surprised to discover an aggressive-looking woman eating a grab-bag of Tostitos. And a guy, presumably the dad, looking on gormlessly, as though you would need to put his two brain cells in the hadron collider and smash them together for him to stand a chance of a coherent thought. Aaah, I thought, that explains it: they’re idiots.)

  The most surprising thing was that this was not a custom-made T-shirt. It’s available to buy online right now, and you can buy all kinds of baby-wear that expresses similar sentiments: baby rompers with slogans that read: “100% Bitch,” or “If you think I’m a bitch you should meet my mom,” and so on. If you’ve ever dressed your baby in one of these things, this may well come as a surprise to you, but when most normal-thinking people see a baby wearing a onesie that reads “100% Bitch,” they don’t actually think that the baby is a 100 percent bitch . . . but they do think that the parents of that baby are 100 percent dumb as fuck.

  In looking up this weird subfashion of bitchwear, I discovered that when it comes to inappropriate clothing for babies, a baby romper that displays the slogan “100% Bitch” is actually pretty tame.

  Quiz question: Which of these baby onesies are available for sale online right now?

  Answer: All of them.

  So, if you’re reading this and you’re still confused as to what is and isn’t appropriate clothing to dress your new arrival in, here’s a useful rule of thumb:

  Appropriate: Pastel clothing with cartoon characters and fun slogans that express how much yo
ur child is loved and cared for.

  Inappropriate: Clothing with slogans that reference wrecked vaginas and mommy’s reluctance to perform oral.

  Stick with that, and you will probably not go too far wrong.

  So fashion for babies is a real thing, a multibillion-dollar industry that caters to all walks of life. And, within reason, you might as well express your own style through your baby’s wardrobe, because by the time they are toddlers they won’t be seen dead in the stuff that you choose anyway. In the modern world, apparently, kids as young as two have an input into what they want to wear and have developed their own style by the time they reach pre-K. It’s the way things are.

  Which is not fair.

  I don’t mean to digress, but when I was a youngster, from the moment I was born, I was almost permanently dressed like a dickhead. My mom and dad didn’t seem to give anything like the thought that is now given to clothing your kids. And it wasn’t just when I was a baby that this was an issue. I couldn’t have any input into my own clothes until I was a teenager, and before that point my parents used to dress me as if it were a punishment.

  Here’s a picture of me aged nine. I’m wearing: a burgundy crushed-velour V-neck sweater with elbow patches, a wide-necked white shirt that looks like a fucking albatross has landed on my neck, and tartan flannel shorts.

  Out of shot is what I was wearing on my feet, which was always knee-high gray socks and brown sandals.

  I can’t think of any reason for dressing me like this other than to ensure that I was bullied. I would often enter the school gates to shouts of: “Coyne, you look like a fucking dweeb!” And that was just from the head of the math department, Mr. Glover.

  When it comes to his wardrobe, Charlie doesn’t know he’s born.

  Practicality

  As I mentioned earlier, the main problem with modern baby clothes is that cuteness is very much the priority, and practicality is so often an afterthought.

  It’s why idiots like me and Lyns buy a baby a pair of denim overalls. Only a moron, or someone with no experience, buys a baby the impractical horror that is a pair of denim fucking overalls. These things are less an item of clothing and more something that Houdini would have attempted to escape from, as he was lowered upside down into a tank of water. (I’ve never owned a pair, but I bet even adult overall-wearers are soiling themselves on a regular basis, trying in vain to escape from the bastard things when they need the toilet.) We bought them anyway, and then we bought them again. Charlie looked cute in them. Point proven.

  If it isn’t overalls that are testing your patience, it’s the teeny-tiny buttons designed for pixie fingers, or the T-shirts with neck holes that are smaller than a baby’s head (so taking them off is like forcing the baby to be birthed again). All of which are minor annoyances by comparison to the ever-present, persistent, tic-inducing and sanity-testing challenge of snaps.

  These simple little inventions are a great idea when there are just a couple of them on a onesie, one or two that you quickly pop open to change a diaper. But on some garments, they are everywhere, thousands of the pissy things. All of which need to be lined up correctly, the correct “outy” to the right “inny.” Otherwise, twenty minutes into the simple task of buttoning up a onesie, you realize that you got the first one wrong, and now the whole thing’s fucked and your baby’s arm is attached to his leg, or there’s a big gaping hole where his butt is.

  Charlie has clothes that take so long to put on that you can start at breakfast and it’s getting dark before you’ve got a leg in. The worst garment we have is an all-in-one romper with a print of a triceratops on the front. This thing is my nemesis. It’s very sweet, but it has twenty-four snaps. Twenty-four. I counted them. It’s like they are there in place of stitching. Basically, there are no arms, there are no legs, just flaps of material where those things should be and a shitload of these little metal bastards that you are expected to snap together. You essentially have to make the arms and legs yourself as you’re dressing him. It’s insane. It’s one thing to have to button up an outfit while you’re dressing your child, but you shouldn’t have to manufacture the legs and arms of the clothes at the same time. We might as well set up a loom in the nursery and weave the shit he’s going to wear for the day.

  I’ve now hidden this abomination behind the washing machine. But the first time I tried to dress him in the thing, it took an age—an age in which I felt the creeping hand of madness. After ten minutes, I’d developed a twitch in my right eye, and by the time I’d got him half dressed, I was curled up in the corner of the room in a fetal position, quietly weeping. I was wild-eyed, rocking back and forth and gibbering: “They won’t line up, Lyns. They won’t line up. . . . There’s so many of them, you see. . . . They won’t line up!!?! . . .” Lyndsay ignored me, snapped the last couple of snaps, and held him aloft: “Ooh, he looks gorgeous.”

  At what cost, Lyns? At what cost?

  The future

  There must be a way of making baby clothes more practical and less the sort of grueling challenge that makes you want to drink all day.

  Snaps seem to proliferate, but why isn’t Velcro used more? As I said in the introduction, if we can make instantly removable, Velcro trousers for male exotic dancers, why can’t we do the same for our babies? What kind of civilization are we that we value our strippers over our newest generation?

  When I suggested the idea of strippers’ clothes for babies on my blog, I got quite a response. (Mainly from people accidentally landing on my page after Internet-searching “male strippers” but still.) People generally thought it was quite a good idea.

  But one response in particular caught my eye. It was someone suggesting an alternative idea. (An idea that, on the face of it, sounds like the worst Shark Tank idea since Mormon lingerie.) They suggested baby clothes that used magnets.

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t reply to someone who sends me a private message extolling the virtues of magnets. I have a siren in my head that goes off when I get messages from crackpots, and enthusiastic fans of magnets are very much in that demographic. But this is actually a real thing. There’s a company that makes magnetic clothes for babies. And they work. It’s genius. Rather than dick around with snaps, you simply place your baby’s arms and legs in the onesie or romper, and they virtually dress themselves as the magnetic buttons come together in that mystical way that magnets do.

  Directed by my mystery magnet fan, I saw the video for these clothes online, and my first thought was that they looked impressive. But my second thought was a more excited one: I couldn’t help but get quite giddy at the possibility that our baby could be crawling around in his magnetic baby-wear, attracting metal objects to himself (tin cans, cutlery, etc.) as if he had telekinetic superpowers.

  So I got in touch with Laura from Magneticbaby and inquired about the possibility that their clothes could turn Charlie into a kind of baby Magneto. I was disappointed.

  “[chuckle] Don’t worry, the magnets aren’t that powerful.”

  “Well, okay, but . . . well, can you make them more powerful?”

  “No. No, we can’t.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “Er, for a start, it would probably be quite dangerous.”

  “Well, how dangerous, becau—”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  Shit.

  So magnetic baby clothes won’t give your tot superpowers (for that we still have to rely on good old genetic mutation or a bite from a radioactive spider). But for dressing your kid without becoming a sobbing mental wreck, they may well be the future.

  In any case, the good news is that the snap issue seems to be a problem we are well on the way to solving, either through magnetic clothes or through the stripper-inspired Dreamboys line I’m thinking of crowdfunding. And that is a comforting thought. It may come too late for me, and maybe too late for you. But it gives me hope and strength to think that our children’s children will never know the indescribable horror of getting to the very l
ast “outy” . . . only to discover that you have completely run out of “innies.”

  DRESSING

  None of the challenges of modern baby clothes would be such a huge issue if, in the process of dressing, your child: Just. Stayed. Still. They don’t. Instead, they create the bizarre illusion that they really are all arms and legs and that you’re dressing a moody, uncooperative baby Vishnu.

  Again, it is fascinating to compare “reality” to “expert advice” and realize that experts ignore the fact that, when the mood takes them, babies can fight being dressed like cornered, syphilitic badgers.

  But it’s not true to say that babies just flail around to avoid being dressed. In fact, they employ quite sophisticated techniques. Techniques that have the two very specific aims of remaining undressed and making the dresser feel like an incompetent moron.

  Returning to The Art of War, Sun-tzu once wrote:

  Know your enemy and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.

  So studying your own baby’s strategies for avoiding being dressed is absolutely vital.

  Here are Charlie’s current favorite tactics:

  The C-3PO: Baby stiffens every limb in body and refuses to bend at the elbows and knees. So called because dressing a baby when he deploys this technique is like trying to get a stubborn C-3PO into a wet suit.

  Effectiveness: 3/5   Annoyance Level: 4/5

  Temptation to say “fuck it” and let baby spend the day in just a diaper: 3/5

  The Sausage Roll: Baby rolls frantically from side to side, like a stuntman on fire who’s trying to put it out. Simple, but incredibly effective.