Fancy Baby Clothes

Fancy baby clothes are for pregnant women. Practical baby clothes are for moms.

I remember being pregnant with my first daughter and spending hours in fancy baby clothing stores. (Well, OK, fancy for me, as in Gymboree and Baby Gap. The exorbitant prices at the ritzier Oilili and Jacadi always left me feeling slightly ill. Well, slightly more ill.) I’d wander around the baby section and select cute outfits, the matching socks, the matching blanket, and very often the matching hat. I imagined how cute she’d look all dolled up in her fancy kitten print.

Maybe I thought that having the perfect wardrobe would make me ready for the terrifying changes that were awaiting me. Maybe it was just fun to be able to buy tiny clothes. A lot more fun than buying more oversized maternity clothes.

Don’t tell my husband, but it’s very possible that I bought hundreds of dollars of clothing for my unborn daughter.

Hundreds of dollars of completely impractical, silly clothes, as it turned out. I am a bit ashamed to tell you how many 0-3 month size dresses my baby never wore.

Seriously, who ever decided that dresses were ideal infant wear? Those poor cold little chicken legs sticking out of the dress! Tights are virtually impossible to maneuver onto a squalling infant, and covering them up in the blanket, even if it is matching, completely defeats the purpose. So, what’s a mom to do?

Except for one or two big events, the dresses went unused. As did the fancy jumpers with the tiny buttons, the cute sweaters, and yes, the sweet little socks, most of which got lost the very first time I washed them. Shortly after my baby was born I ran out to the nearest Carter’s and raided their sale section for onesies, stretchy pants, overalls, and my very favorite, coveralls. From that day one we focused on functional, affordable clothing: things that  could get pooped on, spit up on, or shrunk in the wash without causing a cardiac arrest. (You know, because the set would be ruined. And really where would that leave us?) 

Nowadays my kids wear jeans and t-shirts almost every day, some of them grubby, few of them matching. Once in a blue moon we dress up in a cute little functional party dress. And yes, sometimes those errant socks turn up and tease me with the high hopes I had about how well dressed my kids would be. So I shove them far under the pile of identical white socks and laugh about how innocent I was before my kids were born.

Photo from the private files of Jessica Rosenberg.

Jessica Rosenberg is an aspiring novelist and freelance writer who blogs daily at It’s My Life… and posts frequent reviews at The Lemonade Stand.

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