Fashion Victims

How'd you like to start your morning having tighty whities thrown in your face?

I was helping Julian get dressed and was pulling a rather stretched out pair of cotton undies over his little beanstalk legs. Yes, the undies are a bit droopy. Yes, they had seen better days when they belonged to Julian's older brother. (Unfortunately for Julian, we hand everything down.)

Julian had ignored the indignity for a long time, but today he was getting wise. He flaps the waist of them against his pooch of a belly and then decides it's time to assert himself. He pulls them down and lets me have it.

"I don't want these calzoncillos!" he shouts with total Spanglish fluency, flinging the undies at me.

OK, OK, don't get your panties in a twist I'm thinking, literally. "Julian, why don't you pick out the underwear you want then."

He stomps over to the dresser in a huff. "I WILL pick my own calzoncillos. I WILL pick them." Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. He rips a pair of Spiderman bikinis out of the drawer. Fine with me. The kids in his daycare have all spent the year potty training together and they enjoy showing each other their underwear. Julian especially likes showing off Spidey. This is one of the many things I pretend I haven't noticed is going on.

I finish with Julian and then turn to help Ian, who's lying on the floor with a heap of clothes next to him that I picked out. Ian is more of a problem. My husband and I call him "Jean Paul", as in "Gaultier", because he tends to be a little on the fussy side about clothes.

"I don't want that shirt," he whines. That shirt has buttons. I should have known better. Ian does not wear any shirt with buttons.

"I don't like those jeans," he says, picking them up by two fingers as if they were radioactive waste. "I want to wear my soccer pants." The soccer pants are elastic-waisted sweats, the kind of thing housebound people wear when they've given up on being even close to presentable. I let him play sports in them but won't go any further. It's almost a daily battle.

What feels like a week later, we're walking out the door. Julian is excited about his Spidey underwear. He's also wearing a t-shirt from the "Blue Angels" that the daycare teachers must think is the only shirt he owns. He doesn't wear anything else. Ian is in tears because I vetoed the soccer pants, but through his tears he's not too distraught to cast a critical eye at me.

"Mom? I don't like that shirt."

I inspect myself. "Why?"

"Because it has buttons."

"Well, I tell you what. They're my buttons and I'll wear them if I want to."

Take that, Jean Paul.