Hand Me Downs

It's every mother's dream for their kids to be able to pass their clothes down from one to the other -- to always have cute clothes for their offspring, but to not have to pay for it on a regular basis. (Ok, so it's MOST mothers' dream -- I recognize that there are the crazies out there that believe that their kids are too good for hand me downs. If you're that mom, stop reading now. ;) ) Now when you have two children of the opposite sex, the likely-hood of being able to do that is very slim, even more so when the oldest is the girl.

Don't get me wrong, I had several gender neutral items from when Kairi was a newborn that Alex wore, and she has had some jeans and a few tshirts that were actually from the boys' dept that she's now been able to pass on to her brother. But for the most part, my daughter is a very girly-girl. Her favorite color is pink. Although, purple and red are close runners up. And even before she was showing such preference for pink, I ended up dressing her in pink (despite any original intentions) because I simply got tired of people calling her a boy.

The area I most regret not being able to pass clothes from one child to the other is in shoes. Kairi LOOOOOVES shoes. She has from the time she was 10 months old. If she can get a hold of shoe, it's almost immediately on her foot. And the more sparkly the shoe, the more red or pink a shoe, the happier she is. So as much as I would love to put Kairi's endless array of shoes on Alex's quickly growing feet, I don't. Instead, they all stay in a basket in Kairi's room where she puts them on her dolls feet. Alex usually wears them on his hands.

But this morning, I found that Alex has claimed a pair of Kairi's shoes. When I tried to trade him these shoes for a pair that actually fits (and are brown), he bawled. So I left them on him. I figure that as long as he doesn't insist on wearing them to church tonight, it's not going to hurt anything. And even if he insists on them for church, they have to come off when he sleeps tonight -- right?


Besides, Daddy's not in town right now to complain. For some reason, I don't think he would approve. ;) What do you think?









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ETA:

Later this morning, Alex was mad at me. I still have no idea why. This was the first of multiple similar fits. He walked up to me like this, and didn't stop no matter what I asked him. Here's just under 3 of approx 15 minutes of his fit. ;)