My Girl's Wardrobe Malfunction

My youngest girl had a wardrobe malfunction.

It wasn't her fault, of course. It was mine.

You see, she has pants, shorts, and skirts in her drawer. But that's not all; she also has skorts in her drawer. (A skort is a combination of a skirt and shorts.) To be honest, before I was a dad I had never heard of skorts. If you said the word "skort" I probably would have thought you were talking about one of those spoon/fork combos they have at KFC.

I have two girls, Thing 1 and Thing 3. (I also have two boys, Thing 2 and Thing 4, but they won't factor into our discussion today.) Thing 1 dresses herself. But I still pick out the clothes for Thing 3. One day, I put her in a skirt. She looked cute (as always), but something seemed a little off, and I couldn't quite figure what it was.

Later, as I was changing her diaper I pulled off her skirt and noticed a red indentation line on the skin of her upper thigh. It was then that I realized what I had done: it wasn't a skirt, it was a skort, and I had put both of her legs through one of the leg holes for the skort! Oops! (Luckily she only wore it like that for a short time before I noticed it at the diaper change. Thank goodness for frequent pooping!)

My excuse? I'm a guy. I really have no idea what I'm doing trying to dress a girl.

It's a nice excuse, but it doesn't really cut it. Maybe if Thing 3 was my first girl, but she's not. I've already been to this rodeo. She's my second girl. I really should have mastered the "dressing a girl" thing with the first one.

Unfortunately, the fact that I have two girls contributed to another wardrobe malfunction. The problem was I confused Thing 1's denim shorts with Thing 3's long pants. I put Thing 3 in Thing 1's shorts thinking they were her long pants. And the thing is, I didn't notice for several hours! Yes, the pant/shorts were quite big in the waste on Thing 3, but they only fell off of her a couple of times.

In my defense, can you guess which is the big-girl shorts and which is the little-girl pants?
It's not so easy, is it?
(The big girl shorts are on the right.)

There are inherent differences between boy clothes and girl clothes that I've learned over the years. (Usually I learned them by messing them up somehow.) For one thing, with guys there is no such thing as a "right sock" and a "left sock." Socks are socks. They are interchangeable. But, with girls, sometimes it does make a difference as to which foot the sock is on because they have some froofy flower thing or design that is supposed to be on the outside edge of the sock.

Another difference is that girls sometimes have big, outlandish pockets on the front of their pants. They look like back pockets, but they're actually front pockets. So, of course, I have had my daughter walking around with her pants on backwards many, many times.

Seriously, does that look like a front pocket or a back pocket?

I thought I was getting better. And then I stuffed both of my girl's legs into one leg-hole of her skort.

So, all I can do is keep trying to do my best. And don't worry, I'm sure my daughters will get their revenge when I'm old. I'll be the one at the rest home with his pants on backwards.



Edited from a post originally published on 5/13/2016.