Childrearing
The Only Thing More Confusing Than Women’s Clothes Sizes Is Baby Clothes Sizes
It’s a pain in the ass (and the love handles) to find a pair of jeans that fit me. Depending on which store I visit, I vary by two or more sizes, and I may or may not have to shop in the petites section, because at 5’4″ I am a towering behemoth in some stores but a tiny elf person in others. And yet, the only thing that somehow requires a more complicated level of calculus than women’s pants sizes are clothing sizes for people who can’t even count to three.
As an adult with a weird, post-baby, Silly Putty-esque body myself, I understand that obviously different baby stores are going to have different cuts and sizes. I don’t understand why baby clothes that came from the same store vary so much, even when they’re the same size. Look at these two pairs of pants that both came from Carter’s the same year and are both allegedly sized for a nine-month-old:
For those of you playing along at home, that is slightly more than an inch of fabric, which makes one pair of pants a perfect fit for my daughter, and the other pair an unrollable, foot-drowning safety hazard for her as she takes her Frankenstein’s-monster-esque first steps. Or check out these two pairs of 9M baby jeggings:
The blue jean pair is considerably wider and longer, so my kid actually wears them sometimes, whereas trying to put the skinny-legged pink pair on her chubby little gams is like shoving a watermelon into a tube sock. It’s just not happening.
