Back to school shopping...already???

School doesn't start here until after Labor day, but maybe I'm still on Arizona's schedule where school will be starting in about two weeks. But I feel the need to fill my kids' dressers and closets with new clothes, shoes and backpacks. Perhaps the driving force to this is that I need to spread the expense out over the next month and a half. I forgot how expensive it is to clothe children! For the six or so years that we lived in Arizona we pretty much lived in shorts and t-shirts. The nice thing about shorts is that you don't notice if they're an inch too short. You can wear the same shorts for two or three years. But long pants--not so much. They become high waters in about a month. The boys each had a pair of sneakers, flip flops and church shoes. Winter clothes? Who needs 'em? But now we have to have several pairs of shoes (shoes get wet in the rain and they don't dry overnight!), long pants (ugh!), long sleeved shirts, sweatshirts, coats, gloves, umbrellas...

Luckily most of my kids have no sense of style (wonder if that's a genetic thing), so they don't really care that they're wearing hand me downs that originated in the 80's. Enter Hayden. He's now a teenager. He cares how he looks. He only wants to wear Adidas brand stuff. Nobody seems to be handing down any Adidas stuff to us these days. So I've been buying him generic "sporty" looking clothes, with a few Adidas things to make him feel better about it. Luckily there are good sales for back to school, and even better news...Fred Meyer had 40 percent off their already reduced clearance stuff this week. And there were a few Adidas things on it that Hayden liked.

So now that I have Hayden nearly clothed, I will buy one new outfit for each of the other boys (fill in the rest with more hand me downs), and I will go crazy for Regan. Because I want to.

This is what my kids wore to the first day of school last year. This is pretty much what they wore to school every day for the entire year, with the possible exception of a sweatshirt in the mornings, which would be crammed into their backpacks after school.

And this is what they wear pretty much every day, October through May, in Washington.

I guess I'd better get used to it.