Me, The Children's Place, and the Sweat Pants Beast

On a much lighter note; did you know that jeans are painful? Well according to my kids they are. When Sam was a baby I usually dressed him like a little man. Many of the clothes I bought for him were similar to what I would buy for daddy. Then when he was about 18 months and I was pregnant with Joe I discovered The Children's Place fleece pants, and I bought them about 50 pairs of fleece pants on rock bottom clearance and several matching shirts and that was it. They have worn sweats or athletic shorts every day since. Will and Ben have worn sweats since day one and they also refuse to wear long sleeves. An old t-shirt (preferably one with star wars or something similar on it) and basketball shorts are their outfit of choice, even in sub-zero temperatures. Long pants and especially long sleeves are worthy of tears. Coats and shoes are torture devices. Khaki pants and khaki shorts are "church clothes" only to be worn on Sunday mornings and then shed quickly. They went through a phase of bringing play clothes to church and changing in the bathroom as soon as church was over. We quickly nipped that in the bud. One child even wants his "church pants" to have an elastic waist. We discovered The Children's Place elastic-waist cargo pants and usually buy a few pairs for church each winter. We've had every size of these pants from 2T up. However, these only go up to size
14. This means that soon I'll be shopping for men's elastic waist pants. Do they sell these in the senior citizen section? I want to have fall pictures taken of our family. I would prefer the boys wear jeans and a longs-sleeved button-down shirt. But, I can't escape the feeling that I would be making up something for the picture that wasn't true to our life. I guess I'll go for khakis. This weekend we went to a housewarming party and I wanted the boys to look nice. I pick Grace's clothes and she has such cute stuff. I tried to convince them to wear the one pair of jeans I buy each year - just in case. But, I was informed that jeans hurt. We had to dig through our winter clothes and find our dressiest sweats and most decent t-shirts. To make matters worse the boys ripped the knees out of all of their "good" sweats (Children's Place wind pants) last year. Ugh. I've taken to buying every pair of nice looking warm-up pants I find at the Goodwill. Truth be told, I prefer yoga pants myself, but try not to wear them out of the house too frequently. I'm pretty sure that Grace prefers stretchy pants as well. Why am I writing, this? I'm not sure. I just needed to get it off my chest, and those of you who see us frequently will now understand why my kids always look like they just just left a track-meet.:0)