No Winter Clothes

Part of our long term strategy for getting ready to return to the mainland has been getting our wardrobes ready. We haven’t worn anything approaching winter clothing since October 2007. My wife and I still have several pairs of jeans in bags under our beds, along with sweaters and sweatshirts – even snow boots. Melissa experienced one winter when she was less than a year old, so chances are she doesn’t remember it. The twins have never been anyplace where the temperature was less than 70.

I’m not looking forward to having the troupe put on coats, mittens, hats and boots before we can go anywhere. Right now when we need to leave the house, I yell out that it’s time to get shoes on and our girls get them on all by themselves. Only our boy still needs help getting shoes on, mostly because he wears actual shoes with socks and not sandals.

And yet this process is still a struggle.

The three year old girl debates with herself or us what pair of shoes she will wear (flipflops or tennis). The twin girl takes her sandals on and off throughout the day, so she spends time wandering through the house trying to find where she last left them. And the twin boy gets distracted so easily that someone has to force him to sit down and put his shoes on.

In the meantime, we asked the grandparents to go shopping for us at a rummage sale for children’s clothes in Colorado. While the girls can do the hand-me-down game, our oldest doesn’t have any winter clothes to hand down. The twin girl is older now than our oldest girl was when we arrived on Guam. Each child has to get a brand new wardrobe. We ended up getting over $1000 worth of children’s clothing for only $200 from the rummage sale in Denver. These clothes are being sent to Illinois to meet up with us as soon as we get off the plane.