I will admit it – I’m not really very good at dressing myself (by that I mean matching my outfit, not the actual act of putting clothes on, I’m not some serial nudist). I have a few clothes that I bought as a set and I know that some jeans go with some shirts, but if left to my own devices I will inevitably be told “You can’t wear that jumper!” before my wife Claudia lets me leave the house. It doesn’t really matter if I don’t look like a rock star, ‘cause Claudia doesn’t need to be proud of me when we go to the shops. However, how our daughter looks is another thing altogether.
Almost all of the clothes that we have for our little chicken were not purchased in sets. We were given quite a few and we bought three bagfuls of clothing second hand from a woman who was getting rid of her daughter’s baby clothes. The bags were $15 each and lasted the best part of chicken’s first year. There was a great variety of stuff in there and none of it was dodgy. The only problem was that it wasn’t numbered.
All of the clothing had the sizes clearly marked but it didn’t have a numbering system to help me. You know, an easy to read, easy to understand, foolproof way of making sure that our daughter could be clothed with bodysuit number 1, top number 1 and pants number 1.
Yeah, I know, Pumpkin Patch doesn’t follow Nick’s Numbering System either (although, given the cost of their clothes, they bloodywell should!) but it is a bit more obvious when you purchase everything as a set that it all matches. Even to a man.
When it comes to dressing our chicken I will always fall back on my disability as the reason for not getting it right. I was born with a genetic abnormality which means I can’t properly match clothing, and no, I’m not talking about my Y gene.
You see, I’m colourblind. Not completely colourblind, not like black and white and shades of grey colourblind, but I confuse some colours. For years I thought my old jacket (which Claudia eventually forbid me to wear outside the house unless we were escaping a fire in winter) was bottle green and that Claudia was lying about its shade. Then one day at work I looked at two colleagues wearing green and, referring to my jacket, said “Hey, we’re in the green club!” To which one of them replied “Well we are, but you’re wearing grey.”
So until we start regularly shopping at an expensive children’s clothing store (which, let’s face it, ain’t gonna happen anytime soon) Claudia will have to be content with placing out the clothing I am to dress chicken in the night before.
Or maybe my wife could just accept that even if our daughter’s clothing doesn’t all match itself perfectly, at least it will be pretty obvious that the guy who is dressed just as mismatched walking next to our little chicken is her proud, daggy dad.