matchy-matchy

My cousin Melissa (we call her Missy) brought over some hand-me-down baby clothes on Saturday. I was very grateful for them, because Lucy has actually grown out of some things and threatens to keep growing. (For those of you who don't read my blog regularly (for shame!) I was sort of contemptuous of baby clothes a few months ago, just because the influx of clothes after her birth was so overwhelming. Luckily the spigot seems to have slowed to a more manageable trickle). I was contemplating buying clothes. Gasp!!
Anyway, she brought over a whole big bag of beautiful clothes, many of which featured cute lace, nice fabrics, ribbons, embroidery, etc. They were all in good condition.
So what do I do? I get churlish about the whole thing, of course.
Not because of Missy--I really truly appreciated the gift. And the clothes themselves are useful.
I got surly because I finally realized why baby clothes are so annoying.
See, instead of having separates, like normal clothes, where one top might match another bottom, baby clothes are super matchy-matchy. Little dresses paired with matching bloomers. Cute tops with exactly matching bottoms. Or the truly horrific combination: matching onsie, hat, pants, socks and baby blanket. AHHHHHH!
This increases the volume of the number of clothes you actually need to make a wardrobe. Instead of having, say, three pairs of pants and ten shirts you can mix and match, you have twenty pants and forty shirts, none of which go with each other.
It's even worse with baby socks. Then you have twenty different pairs that you have to keep straight. That means the washing machine isn't allowed to eat any and you can't accidentally leave one on your friend's lawn (as I did the other day) or on the floor of a restaurant (this also happened). Or that they aren't allowed to fall off (ha! my side!) We went from ninety pairs (mostly hand-me-down) to twenty when I gave some of them back to the people who let us borrow them (I thought ninety pairs was too many! How naive!). Now we're down to five single non-matching socks. So I bought ten pairs of identical white socks at Target. I wish they had generic pants and shirts to go with them.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I do think the clothes are lovely, and now that Lucy's getting slightly easier to dress (she can sit up while I pull stuff over her head!) I am more into clothes in general. Plus I am not sleep-deprived. When you are sleep-deprived, the baby clothes madness seems like a cruel joke.
So now that the larger clothes are organized into sizes and packed away for later, and the currently-fitting ones are tucked into baskets on Lucy's changing table, I am much less churlish and surly*. I even put her into cute clothes for church! Little jeans, a hoodie, and a flowered shirt! She looked adorable! Until the pants got wet in the sink in the changing room and then she was just in a diaper and shirt and hoodie after the service, when everyone actually saw her.
Sigh.

*Confession: I mostly just wrote this post for the chance to use "churlish" and "surly" several times. Don't those words just roll off the tongue?