School clothes shopping | pad patter 8.14.18

I love clothes shopping, and the only really girly thing about my daughter is her wardrobe (mostly because I pick it out because she doesn't care all that much -- ha!) so we have lots of fun with it. She has never played with dolls or Barbies, doesn't like her hair being messed with, and is mostly into reading & Minecraft/Roblox so this is all I got!

She wore a pink dress with multi-colored unicorns and golden sneaker slip-ons for her first day of school.

Boys' clothes are soooooooo boring that I have to get all my fun via my daughter & myself. My 4-year-old picked out a PLAIN green (his favorite color) teeshirt to wear with his plain brown shorts and plain Army green tennis shoes for his first day of school.

School supply shopping is not fun so I go to one store, and one story only, and buy it in one fell swoop. I don't go to different stores, price match, etc. My time is worth more than whatever I would save doing that.

 

oh man, I just did that last week! We even have a "tax free" weekend here in TX where you don't pay any sales tax on purchases...and i absolutely avoid shopping that weekend at all costs (it's SO crowded everywhere!).

This year I have two middle schoolers - daughter in 8th and son in 6th. It was so cute/funny how serious he was about getting "the right" clothes for school! he wanted cool t-shirts and hoodies. My daughter has been shopping off and on all summer, so she had a pile of new stuff ready for school already. Had to buy them each shoes (Vans). between clothes for the two of them and their school supplies we spent about $1000 on back to school stuff.

I absolutely LOATHE shopping though, so I'm like all those dads you mentioned - just buy what they want and get the heck out of there! lol.

 

Here is a picture of the thing I use (the pincher bodkin)... I didn't know what it was called so it was hard to find and apparently JoAnns doesn't sell them at least online. It was my Mom's from when I was a kid... Anyway you pinch the elastic and then use the metal to weave the elastic through "channel" where the drawstring is in athletic pants.

 

I lied! I searched for "metal bodkin" and nothing showed up, but when I searched for just "bodkin" it did:



and it's CHEAP! Only $2.49!

 

like @Rachel Jefferies & @LynnG have mentioned it can be a case of "yay for uniforms, boo for uniforms" here - to me, the financial outlay is justified by the fact that you aren't judged on your taste in clothing here on that first day and what to put on each day is not even something you need to expend any energy worrying about - even mufti to some extent is limited with it often being tied to a fundraising cause (like Jeans for Genes day the other week or you need to wear red, yellow or black to support an indigenous cause etc all for a gold coin donation or cross country/athletics carnival days where you have to wear house/team colours). That said when the 'texture' of the clothing is not something your child likes it can be painful - DD very much misses the feel of polo shirts and tracksuit pants from primary school days!

 

gah. I gave up and ordered shirts and shorts online- it was easy at least. Now I just have to get them shoes.

 

We have school uniforms. We only have the one option for most of the items. One thing I hate about school uniforms is we don't have any choice about what it's made out of, and the other is that it's really expensive.
When my eldest started the secondary school I was passed two huge bags full of hand-me downs that would see all three of my children through the school. Last year they changed the school uniform on us ... I was not impressed.