Umbrellas

I always feel bad when I don't post something on here twice a week or so--and I hope to post something at least passingly interesting at least once a week. This week, however, the kids and I have utterly failed to do anything terribly noteworthy.

But that won't stop me from posting SOMETHING.

Yesterday, Libby took the kids shopping for new shoes. Gabe has finally reached the point where we only need to buy him new shoes every six months or so, which is a blessing. Norah, however, jumps a shoe size every month or two. She is now--get this--almost a size 8. Gabe is 11 1/2. To give you an idea of just how big Norah's feet are, Gabe's BFF Finn, who's a couple weeks older than Gabe, also wears a size 8. Admittedly, Finn stopped growing about six months ago--Gabe seems to be a head taller than him now--but still. As it stands now, our 21 month old is wearing clothes that are AT LEAST 3T. If they are girl clothes, for them to not be skin tight on her butt and legs and for the shirts to not ride up her formidable gut, she has to wear 4T--but she can still comfortably wear boys' 3T clothes.

From what I can tell, boys clothes are fitted to wear comfortably--nice and baggy shirts that are plenty long and such like. Girls clothes are ALL shorter and tighter. I guess they assume little girls have short torsos and tiny little bellies. Not Norah, I guess. Sadly, most of the boys 3Ts that we have are not very gender neutral (they would have been if I'd been the one buying clothes, because I'm sensible like that, but since it was Libby and other family, all of his clothes have pictures of trucks and dinosaurs and robots and stuff on them).

Anyway. Shoe shopping. After she found each of them a new pair of tennis shoes, for reasons known only to her, she let them start playing with umbrellas. Which they HAD to have. That's right. Umbrellas. I've gone my entire life without owning an umbrella of my own. Do you know why? Because I live in Kansas. We get rain, of course, and plenty of it at certain times of the year. But I can count on one hand the number of times we get a rain that isn't torrential and doesn't include wind gusts of 30 mph or more. In other words, umbrellas are useless here. And umbrellas for kids--who will never know the right circumstance to use them--are even more useless. I give them two uses before they are turned inside out.

If they even make it out of the house, that is. They've been demanding to play with them all morning.

Still, they are pretty cute posing with their umbrellas.

That damn binky. I swear we're losing ground with it now, too. He's gotten very good at hiding them on his person when he comes downstairs and then secreting them away behind or under the couch for later. We've been prepping him for the Binky Fairy to come take them away to poor babies in need when he turns four, but I'm pretty sure he hasn't actually grasped the concept yet. It will not be fun.

Ignore the wet spot on her coat. Libby didn't let her get wet enough to soak through all of her clothes or anything.