Category Archives: Fashion

Warning: Very Frivolous Post

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It’s December!  The sun is shining!  The snow is slushy!  My husband’s office Christmas party is only tomorrow!
I know the socially acceptable norm is to hate the office Christmas party, especially the HUSBAND’S office Christmas party, but I…don’t.  Frankly, I love it.  I look forward to it every year.  I love dressing up, and eating food that I didn’t make, and drinking lots of wine…and I realize that those are things I could do NOT at a Christmas party, but I love the festivity of it all.  My love for office Christmas parties is so great that I am thinking of a new career: hiring myself out to attend Christmas parties for those women who do not want to go.  It will be like being a Christmas party escort, but in a totally non-skanky way.  In fact, I offered to wife swap for my friend Nan when she wrote about not wanting to go to her husband’s party.  (I think it may have weirded her out.  But Nan!  There’s going to be karaoke!  KARAOKE!  I only wish there was karaoke at my husband’s party.) 
It’s probably fortunate that there is not karaoke, given that my zest for singing far, far exceeds my actual talent.  Related: Mark’s recent report card was very good in every area except music.  “Mark is an enthusiastic student, but requires support when using his singing voice.” 
You know how there are people who are Shoe People, or Handbag People, those who have many of those items and enjoy shopping for them, who change their shoes and/or handbags to go with every outfit?  I am not one of those people.  (I am more of a Coat and Sweater Person).  So I was looking at my outfit for the party: the dress that I bought for last year’s party that I did not end up attending, boots dating from 1999, and my “handbag”.  My “handbag” is actually a well worn, large messenger bag from Roots that is constantly stuffed full with everything from travel Kleenex and hand sanitizer to gloves and five different lip products.  Currently there is also a book of stamps and several grocery lists jammed in there alongside a bracelet made out of pompoms and jingle bells that one of Mark’s little friends made for me.  In other words, it doesn’t really “go” with a party outfit.  Usually I borrow a handbag from my mother – who is not only a Handbag Person and a Shoe Person, but also just a Clothing Person in general.  Girl likes to shop. – but she is currently out of town.  (Note: she just chastised me for not just going over to her house and rummaging through her things until I found an appropriate bag.  Sorry Mom!  I try not to make it my business to just go through other people’s things.  Especially someone’s closet.  Don’t want to find something I don’t want to find if you know what I mean and I think you do.)
Anyway, I really needed to find a handbag, so I spoke to my very good friend who is, without a shadow of a doubt, a Handbag Person and she gave me tips on where to go to maximize my shopping experience.  I followed her directions, all the while breathing deep ujjayi breaths to alleviate my anxiety.  And look what I found!

Cute, right?  A little handbag, all my own!  Not only do I think it is cute, it was on half-price!  Did I mention I love my Handbag Friend?  And boots to replace the ones from 1999!  They are, I think, just the right mix of cute and slutty.  I’m all ready for the party! 

Crazy, I’m crazy for feeling this way…

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My in-laws were here for a visit this weekend, and they brought with them fresh-picked apples and Concord grapes, and for someone like me who lives in a place in which fresh, local fruit is limited to crabapples and Saskatoon berries, this gift was most gratefully received.  I’m mowing through the produce at an unbelievable rate.  They also, kindly, brought me a female scarecrow for the front yard, to complement the three male ones, and my husband set it up in front of the window, where it looks very cute.  Unfortunately, it keeps startling me every time I walk past the window and see a large figure in my peripheral vision.  It’s like having my very own non-threatening peeping Tom. 
I go through my closet a couple times a year and make up bags for donation.  One place I – obviously, it would seem – never go through is my bottom dresser drawer.  That drawer seems to be devoted to non-every-day-use lingerie type items, sleepwear, and the like.  Yesterday I went to look for a pair of tights, and found nine pairs of gigantic maternity pantyhose.  Nine pairs!  Since I was a jeans-clad stay-at-home mom throughout my pregnancy with Jake, that means that those are from my first pregnancy, seven years ago.  I have had gigantic maternity pantyhose taking up a large amount of drawer space for the past seven years. 
The reason I was even looking for a pair of tights is that I am getting together my real dress up clothes – not just my good jeans – because I am going on a little vacation!  My husband’s birthday is coming up and it’s a milestone one, so we are heading on a three-day-two-night vacation.  Here’s my confession: I have never left the boys for more than 24 hours, so I’m feeling a little bit anxious.  I know.  I know. 
My parents are moving into our house for the duration and I hasten to add that my mother is VERY competent.  She knows the kids’ routines and their schedules and their school doors and their food preferences and even the names of their friends.  She could certainly handle them for more than this short vacation, but despite this I seem to be a mass of nerves.  I’m flitting around the house, frantically cleaning things and preparing food because my mom has only been cooking for DECADES.  She might not be able to handle spaghetti.  Clearly, I’m crazy.
The only foreseeable issue is that my dog will become even more spoiled.  I swear, my mother spoils my dog almost as much as she spoils the boys.  When I told her about the vet appointment that found Barkley on the road to obesity, she indignantly came up with excuses ranging from “The vet’s scale must be WRONG” to “Maybe Barkley’s just big-boned.”  Yes, and maybe he’s getting his period and is retaining water.  So the only issue in going away is that the dog’s diet may be derailed for a couple of days, which is not much of an issue.

Wake me up when September ends

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Last Friday I realized that there was going to be a joint family birthday celebration on the weekend for Jake and my dad, and, like always, I needed to buy a gift for my dad.  For some reason I always, always leave his birthday gift for the last minute, and then make a panicked rush to the mall where I wonder what to get a sixtyish man who has everything, and end up buying the same splash aftershave that I always buy.  This is exactly what I did last Friday, and when I got home I opened a drawer to find the golf shirt I bought for him a month before in an effort to bypass my usual end-of-September panicked mall rush.  I guess I can cross him off my Christmas list, that is, if I remember.
While I was at the mall I decided, in addition to purchasing evidently redundant birthday gifts, I needed to look for a pair of jeans.  My stay-at-home mom uniform consists of jeans, and a couple of my standbys are getting quite threadbare.  So I popped into a jean store, spotted a super-perky eighteen year old salesgirl, and said, like a hip Betty White, “I need some jeans that will make my butt look really good!”  She nodded earnestly and said seriously “I totally understand.  I have a really bad butt too.”  Hm.  That wasn’t exactly the response I expected.  I was still a little congested, so I stood there for a moment wondering if perhaps I had misheard her – after all, who would actually say that – but I couldn’t, and still can’t, figure out what might had been said instead. 
As an aside, any of my girlfriends to whom I have related this story have reacted with appropriate horror, but my husband seems to have taken a peculiar blame-the-victim stance, saying that I shouldn’t have asked for something to improve the look of my butt as that implies that I do, indeed, have a bad butt.  So it’s really my fault, in his view, and the salesgirl was just trying to help.  I do not think I agree with this assessment.
Anyway, maybe my bad-butt bonding with the salesgirl was actually beneficial, because she brought me the most comfortable and flattering jeans that I have ever worn.  I’m wearing them right now as a matter of fact.  However, before she brought me my new favourite jeans, she brought me a pair of skinny jeans, just for “fun”.  Against my better judgement, I tried them on.  I had a small self-esteem crisis right there in the change room.  Not only were they terribly unflattering, but they were also an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the Flight of Time, since they strongly resembled jeans I wore over two decades ago.  Remember safety pinning the ankles of your jeans?  Or rolling them tightly?  Or – if you had a mother who knew her way around a sewing machine, as I did – having them sewn tightly along the calf and ankle?  Yeah.
Never again.  After this debacle, someone told me that the Gap sells skinny jeans that are, apparently, awesome, so I looked them up on their website.  That’s when I saw these.  Stirrup jeans!!  Stirrups!  I never thought I would see the day, I tell you.  Flight of Time indeed.

I’m With Stupid

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My husband went back to work this week after two weeks off, and to be honest, I oscillated between looking forward to getting back to regular routine and dreading the kids’ emotional fallout from getting back into our regular routine. This week has been fine, anticlimactically enough, and so yesterday we went to an amusement park with a good friend and her daughters. We were standing in line, and I noticed the twentysomething guy behind us wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “Vagitarian”.

Ew. Also? Unlikely. I’m fairly certain that someone advertising himself as a Vagitarian is more likely to be living in his parents’ basement playing Wii and using his mother’s back copies of Glamour magazine instead of purchasing pornography than he is to actually have been ever involved in an intimate relationship with a woman. I’m just speculating here, but that seems the most likely conclusion. I mean, I cannot imagine any self-respecting woman seeing a guy in a Vagitarian shirt and thinking that she would like a piece of that action, yes please, and can you keep that shirt on for the duration? Seriously. I once saw a guy wearing a shirt that read “Yes, it IS that big!” Uh huh. Sure it is.

Of course, I am writing this while wearing a shirt that says “Harmony, Peace, Serenity”, so I’m not sure what that says about me as a person.

T-shirts with statements are strange things. On the one hand, I find them somewhat amusing when I see them in a store. When I see them actually being worn, I have the same feeling that I have when I see personalized license plates – somewhat LAME. Or worse. I saw a little onesie that said “All Mommy wanted was a back rub”, which is slightly amusing, I guess, but if I actually saw it being worn by an infant, I would be absolutely appalled.

No one is quite immune to the lure of the t-shirt, though. Recently my husband and I were in Banff for the night and immediately following a meal in which I was channelling my inner Carrie Bradshaw by drinking one too many Cosmopolitans we stopped in one of those tacky tourist shops. Right in front of me was a shirt that said “Too pretty for math”. Squee! I wanted that shirt right away and had I had two too many Cosmopolitans, instead of one, I probably would have purchased it on the spot, but as it was, I still was somewhat capable of rational thought: a) the population at large does not know me, so the irony of the statement would be unappreciated, and b) a woman in her mid-thirties with permanent forehead creases, grey roots, and varicose veins wearing such a shirt is pathetic at best.

So perhaps I should follow my own “Harmony, Peace, Serenity” t-shirt and give the “Vagitarian” the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was channelling his inner Frank the Tank when his t-shirt was purchased. Perhaps.

Travelled down that road and back again

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So I’ve been feeling blue and gloomy and then I realized this morning that in four weeks the kids are back at school, and a cursory glance at their dressers indicates that every single pair of pants they own have no knees. I’m not saying they have small rips, either, I mean that when they are kneeling on the ground large amounts of their legs are exposed. So I took my blue and gloomy self to the mall today, where I was immediately faced with the Gap, advertising – girls of the 80’s, are you ready for this? – jeans with zippered ankles. Zippered ankles! I stood and stared until it got weird, then I snapped out of my reverie to notice the mall was filled with young girls, all wearing jeans tight at the ankles with big, blousy tops and pointy-toed flats. What’s next? Acid wash denim? Bubble skirts? Going through a can of Salon Selectives hairspray every week to obtain rock hard four inch vertical bangs? Because I honestly don’t think the environment can withstand that kind of abuse.

If that wasn’t enough, I walked past the Apple store and the hundreds of people waiting for the new iPhone. There’s a new iPhone? My cell phone doesn’t even have voice mail. I feel like maybe tomorrow I would be shuffling around with a walker, wearing turquoise slacks and a floral blouse, with matching plastic jewellery and a gigantic purse containing a change purse and a roll of Scotch mints.

Then – I know! There’s more! – I walked by American Apparel and it reminded me of this article about the company’s sketchy hiring practices and the ensuing boycotts. Of course, that affects me not at all since American Apparel is not one of the two stores that I actually purchase clothing from, given my great dislike for going into different stores with different sizing methods and different clothing qualities.

When I was in university, I waitressed at a chain restaurant that had similar hiring practices. If a person was to drop off a job application, one was supposed to put a mark on it indicating that person’s “bar appeal”. If that person sat next to you in a bar, my manager explained to me, would you start up a conversation? If not, perhaps there was a position for that person in the kitchen. American Apparel’s hiring practices are not exactly unique, but they are distasteful. In a weird way, it made me think of that Seinfeld episode where George hires a secretary, passing up all the gorgeous, sexy women for the plain and hyper-organized and efficient one. Then – of course – he becomes insanely attracted to her efficacy on the job and they end up having an affair. The point, I guess, is that one should not judge a book by its cover? Or maybe that being a Type A is really really hot? I don’t even know what my point is, except that in writing this, I’m not so blue and gloomy. Even though I feel a bit like I’m one step away from getting a once-a-week hairdo at the local beauty parlour and finding a secondary use for bread bags.

Welcome to the world!

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I have a brand new niece! She was born yesterday and although I haven’t met her yet, her pictures are pretty cute! My mother informed me today that she thinks the baby looks like me, when I was a baby, and I am both flattered and deeply skeptical. I mean, she’s one day old. Most one day old babies look pretty much the same, colouring and the existence or otherwise of hair notwithstanding. Also, I am completely skeptical of family resemblance claims unless those claims come from some non-emotionally invested third party. I don’t know how it is in your family, but in mine, discussions regarding who the baby looks like are wrought – wrought! – with emotion and bias. Similar features can be imagined, or, alternately, refused to be acknowledged, depending on the family member who shares said features.

I have a very bizarre example. My older son is the spitting image of his father. This is universally acknowledged, with the exception of one member of my husband’s family, who did not see the resemblance at all. Instead, this person persisted in comparing my son to another family member, at every single opportunity. I cannot say why, but this bothered me to no end. I have since made peace with this irritation; children look the way they look and that has nothing to do with the little people they are.

That said, I just got grumpy thinking about it.

But back to the important news – my new niece. I’m very excited she’s here, and I’m looking forward to shopping for baby gifts. Do you think she’s too young for a bikini?

(Bikinis are size 0-3 months, from Gap and Old Navy)

Me, I want a hula hoop

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So here’s the thing: if you are trying to cut back on unnecessary consumption, and you decide on the third rainy, dreary day in a row to run to the mall to pick up some Father’s Day cards and also some teacher appreciation gifts, do NOT under any circumstances just “pop in” to Lululemon to “just look” because that “just looking” will lead to finding Tiffany blue yoga pants, and purchasing another pair of yoga pants is completely frivolous and unnecessary, but oh, look, they are TIFFANY BLUE and there is also a MATCHING HEADBAND and you have a yoga weekend workshop coming up in two days and aren’t they pretty? The next thing you know you will be leaving the mall with a bag full of cards, gift certificates, chocolate shaped apples, and a completely unnecessary yoga outfit, because you will inevitably find a top that goes with those pants, even though you were “just looking”.

Sigh.

Speaking of unnecessary consumption, the other day I was running errands and found myself at Wal-Mart. I know what you’re thinking: Wal-Mart, with its predatory pricing and suspicious business ethics and labour policies, but honestly, it’s a great place to stock up on shampoo and Kleenex. It’s also, apparently, a great place to buy hula hoops.

I may not be able to run very fast, and I may scream with terror and duck whenever a ball is thrown in my direction, and I cannot and have never been able to turn a cartwheel, but hoo boy, can I hula hoop. I can keep that baby going for a long time, and I can even do my childhood trick of starting the hoop at my waist,

keep it going on my knees,


and then skipping with it on my ankle.


The trouble with this youthful behaviour is that spinning a hula hoop on your legs and knees, when you have massive, bulging varicose veins leads to massive, purple bruises all over said veins. It’s just as attractive as it sounds. Sigh.