Saturday, January 10, 2009

I'm glad I'm a girl


I grew up with three brothers (no sisters) , had three sons of my own (no daughters) and also live with another guy, my husband. So I've bought boy clothes for a long, long time. When my guys were younger, I'd go into a department store and be bombarded with aisle after aisle and rack after rack of girl clothes, in the most amazing rainbow of colors. I'd walk past these and find the small section of boy stuff, in the dullest colors of grey, dark blue, and if it was a more progressive store, the breakout color, green! I could never do red, white and blue, which was also popular. Three little flags running around was not my idea of cute.
As the boys grew, they needed man shirts. I found them on the shelves of the store, all tightly packaged up, with nary a clue as to how big they were. I'm a visual person and I could pick up any article of clothing, hold it out, and say, "Yep, that'll fit." But what do those sizes mean, 13, 15, 16 1/2? I soon found out that was the neck size. A man can by an entire shirt by just the size of his neck?!!!! I've seen a lot of men with bellies are WAY bigger than their neck, and other men with flat abs. I just don't get it. Can you see a woman buying a blouse that's folded to the size of a piece of paper?! But my husband told me what size his neck was, so I bought a few new shirts for him.


I tore off the plastic wrapping, pulled out 7 stick pins, (who puts these in?!), took off 2 stickie tags, one plastic piece tucked under the front collar and around the button, a cardboard neck ring, tore off 2 cardboard tags, and finally got the shirt down to a piece of cardboard backing and tissue paper. Whew! Luckily I recycled everything, but what a waste of resources! Now let's hope the shirt fits cuz I'll never get it all back together!

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