Moms vs. Dads

We had another clothing snafoo the other day. Liam had gotten his sleepsack a little wet the other night, so last night we decided to just put some footy pajamas on him (normally we use one of those sleeping gowns under the sleepsack). Josh was going to be getting him ready for bed, while I got his bottle ready. I told him that the pj’s toward the middle of the drawer were probably the ones he would want. When I got in the room, Josh immediately tells me that the pj’s are a little snug, but he did manage to get them on. I figured it was fine and we could weed things out in the morning. However, when I started feeding Liam, I noticed that the sleeves came down just barely past his elbows, and it looked like he couldn’t straighten his legs out all the way. So when I lifted him up to burp him, I checked the tag. It read “Small 8-11 lbs”. Hmmmm….that would have fit him about 6 lbs. ago. No wonder they were snug! I still thought maybe he’d be OK for the night, so I put him in the crib and watched for a second. He wasn’t putting his legs down. It was like the jammies were so tight that his legs had to be suspended in the air. At that point I felt bad and picked him back up, found some larger jammies, and changed him. When I went back downstairs, I told Josh about this. He attempted to put it back on me, by saying that I had said pick some in the middle of the drawer. I guess I didn’t realize that he would just grab something without checking the tag (should have known better after the day he tried stuffing Zachary into Liam’s shorts). I think for a man, checking the tag for what size it is must be like asking for directions. They don’t like to do it! He is really very helpful, and very good at being a dad – don’t get me wrong. But it’s funny to me thinking about all the ways that dads are different from moms. I didn’t have the experience of growing up with a dad in the house, so I never really saw firsthand that dads do things differently from moms. So this has been both comical and enlightening for me to watch Josh do certain things with minimal or no input from me, and see what turns up on the other end. Most of the time the result is very good – other times, I just have to laugh & shake my head. I will never forget the day last fall that I was dropping Zachary off at school one morning. This dad walked in with a baby boy, and a little girl Zachary’s age. He was looking all flustered and like he just didn’t have a clue. The baby seemed pretty normal, but the poor girl…her hair was a total mess, her clothes didn’t match at all…I thought to myself that this guy’s wife had to be out of town. No mother would let her daughter out of the house looking like that (the little girl normally looked pretty cute). I guess that’s another benefit of having boys. You don’t have to do anything with their hair, and it’s really a no-brainer matching a shirt with a pair of khaki shorts or pants. It’s hard to mess that up. So there’s never any worry if I’m away of what the kids might look like after being dressed by Daddy.