Floogin McNoogin, Fashion Faux Pas.

This morning, like most mornings, my daughter threw a fit getting dressed.

Things always start out normal. She wakes up in a great mood, all happy and excited for the new day. She gets dressed and things go haywire. This is always a result of her outfit. She will only wear leggings. No jeans. No skirts or dresses. Leggings and nothing else. To make matters worse, the leggings all stop just below the knee and she doesn't like to wear boots so, now that it's cold, a fight ensues.

She's yelling at my wife, my wife is screaming back and I step in and try and diffuse the situation to no avail.

In the end, I'm fighting with my wife, my daughter is in tears, my wife is pissed at me and my son is pissed off for being woken up so early.

A hell of a way to start the day.

So, after listening to my wife and daughter scream at each other, I snapped. We were now going to be late for school and that is a bad thing. My daughter is in a special program and, as I've mentioned in prior postings, if she is late or absent more than a handful of times, she can be tossed from the program.

So I snapped.

I'm screaming at my wife to just let her wear whatever the hell she wants.

I'm screaming at my daughter to stop being such a fucking diva and get dressed.

I'm trying to talk to my son, to convince him we're not all insane.

My daughter shouts "I want to go to therapy after school because you guys are making me crazy."

I tell her she can go to therapy 7 days a week at the home for difficult girls.

She cries some more.

Finally, she puts on jeans, tears are streaming down her face. She's upset beyond belief.

We leave the apartment at 8:30. School starts in 15 minutes and we have a 15 minute drive in traffic free, 3 am roads. Unfortunately, it's rush hour so we won't make it to the school in less than 30 minutes and I'm furious.

We're in the hallway, waiting on the elevator and I'm trying to talk to my daughter about the morning insanity and I tell her that I'm sorry for yelling but I don't understand these things. I explain that women are different from me. I tell her that women go berserk over their clothes. Their underwear needs to match the rubber band in their hair and this makes no sense to me. I tell her that men get dressed and women have this inane ritual of trying shit on, alternating shoes that result in a shirt change and that her mother is guilty of this and it is creating a monster in my little angel.

My daughter says "so, men don't care about their clothes?"

We step on the elevator.

I tell her that we care but we don't need to spend hours trying on a hundred different combinations of pants and shirts and then, after settling on the shirt and pants, spend another hour trying shoes. We just don't do that. We have pants and shirts, they either match or they don't and we have shoes, brown or black, and they go with the pants or they don't.

I tell her "look at me. Do I look like some kind of billboard fashion model? No. I'm wearing a white shirt, brown pants and brown shoes. There's really..."

That's when I saw it.

I was wearing two different shoes.

The elevator stops, I grab my daughter's hand and tell her we need to go back up, I can't go to work in two different shoes.

My daughter looks at me and I swear I heard her thinking "putz"


As we pulled up to the school, I told her she'd have to run into the building while I paid for the cab.

She told me that, when they asked why she was late, she was going to tell them the truth, that daddy wasn't happy with his outfit and had to go back and change.

The six year old wins, again.