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.

I’m not what you could call a super-organized person, but I do like to sort my kids’ clothing into some semblance of order so that I make sure I know where all their correctly-sized fall clothes are in the fall, where all their winter sweaters and jackets are in the winter, and so on. This is not easy when a shirt that claims to be ‘size 12 months’ could either mean it will hang off my son like a potato sack, or that he outgrew it three months ago. What this works out to mean is that I reorganize their closet about every five minutes, trying to find some configuration that both makes sense and will not result in me uncovering an outgrown cache of shorts and t-shirts in mid-January. If I can’t sort by labeled size, I can at least sort by actual size, right? But wait: should I sort by length? Width? Should I devise a complicated system to estimate the actual surface area of each garment, and sort by that? What kind of unholy system does it take for my daughter to sleep in size 9M pajamas last night; and then wear a size 18M turtleneck that fits her equally well today?

I’m starting to get a little more of a feel for which clothing brands err in which directions. Carter’s clothing generally seems to run a bit long, especially in the pants department; that, or my children just have comically stumpy legs. Or both. Gerber-brand clothing is intended for extremely petite, extremely slender children, or possibly for people who like to dress kielbasas and hot dogs up in cute onesies. Garanimals is something of a grab bag: I’ve since given away two of their onesies that we had, which were within millimeters of being the exact same size despite one being labelled as “0M” and the other as “6-9M.” (If your newborn looks like Fat Buddha, or if your nine-month-old can best be described as “wizened”, Garanimals is probably a good bet for you.)

And of course, I can’t leave out my new favorite brand: the Idaho Russet. Hey, if the kids are going to look like they’re wearing a potato sack anyway, why not go all out?

(Image: Max Topchii/Shutterstock)