A plain pain

It's been a long time since I've had a rant about baby clothes however I suddenly feel the need.

I have trawled the stores looking for some plain, solid-coloured tops that don't have fluffy bunnies or little trains that say 'toot toot' on them and I have come up empty handed. Annoyingly, I inherited some perfect, hand-me-down t-shirt body-suits for him in the right colours which he has now grown out of and nobody at the store whose label is stitched into them seems to know or care if they still do them - however the sales girl said 'we always get asked if we sell plain ones'. I have a vision of sales girls just like her the length and breadth of Britain being asked for plain baby clothes and then right after they pop their gum, forgetting to pass it along to anyone who counts.

We parents of course have to shoulder some blame, I mean, if enough of us emailed companies demanding plain clothes for babies (to go with their gumshoes? I digress) we may get them. The trouble is that we know for certain that by the time the company responded, ordered the clothes and put them in the shops, we won't need them any more, we'll be too busy buying the latest trainers and video games and working four jobs to keep our offspring in burgers, iPods and extra sugar. The colour of their shirts will be the least of our worries. So, about thirty seconds after the gum gets popped, we walk out muttering under our breath and clutching a bag of stripey clothes with little bunnies on them.

And, where do baby clothes go once they've had their time on a baby's butt? Mine are going into a hiding place where D can't throw them out until I go through The Change or he agrees to another baby. Is that where they go? Cellars and attics and holes in the bottom of the garden Just In Case? I had a load of hand-me-downs from a mate which I have now handed on to another friend so presumably some baby clothes do the heavy lifting while others spend the majority of their time polishing their pop studs and living a life of leisure in a comfy box.

There must be an enormous un-tapped resource of baby clothes hiding out in the world, lurking in trunks and plastic storage bags, occasionally being fingered in a somewhat nauseatingly nostalgic way by Mums wishing to recapture the past when their dear little bundles of window-smashing joy could do nothing more strenuous then fall asleep with a little sigh. Perhaps there's an underground baby-clothing railroad where the good pieces get shipped off to form their own brave new world in which no baby will ever poo on their linings again.

A lot of baby clothes find their way onto eBay I've noticed, but these tend to be the more exhibitionistic clothes such as bundles of designer clothes and lots of fancy shirts with, er, stripes and trains on them. The humble, plain coloured t-shirt is clearly not exciting enough to enter the arena of online sales and so I am now seriously considering buying some cheap white ones and dying them myself.

Until then my baby will go naked but for the 50 factor sunscreen... and a few bunnies.
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