Malone battles with a coat wearing rebellion
Why does my five year old have so many coats? It’s distasteful almost, to have such abundance in these austere times! Her old coats still fit, yet I can’t resist buying her that sale bargain Hello Kitty one… And then that child’s batwing mod parka on sale. These recession ‘sales’ are ruining my finances, but I find much comfort in that I am helping the country’s economy.
She also has a fake leather bomber from when she was three which she still crams herself into to ‘look like a teenager’. She has already learnt that one doesn’t need to move one’s arms or even break oneself from a fall if one can look cool in a mock leather bomber. Then family sent a lovely red coat. She’s five and now has five coats! She has all these coats, yet will she wear one? No. “I’m too hot,” she says leaving the house as I hold the coat, running after her while gaining grey hairs and a looming alcohol dependency with the stress of the daily coat battle. I am freezing! “Aren’t you cold yet?” I ask, my breath making a panting mist as I speak. “No!” she says, (either she is incredibly stubborn or her little body is not made up of blood, tissue and pasta pesto like most kids, but in fact inside her she houses a powerful furnace).
“She now has five coats! Will she wear one? No”
I am considering selling her energy to the national grid. With the profits I will have my grey hairs dyed and invest in Smirnoff. The constant battles to get her to wear a coat are driving me to drink/hairdressers/plain exhaustion.
This particular day I had a craving for chocolate so I suggested a treat; that at 6pm instead of getting in pyjamas ready for bed, we zoomed up the shop for sweets! The five year old took ten minutes to get ready! Appeared wearing only a pair of tights and a cardigan… Oh and sporting the Chinese decorative slippers her dad had bought her, demanding I “put her hair up”. Half-way up the road she wanted to turn back to change shoes, crying wildly that she couldn’t keep them on and arguing furiously that they were not slippers
(err, what is a shoe with no back heel?).
This is why you don’t go out near bedtime with kids. But my body needed chocolate so I carried her whingeing mass to the store where I allowed her to not wear shoes ‘as a treat’. She was ecstatic about this, (as this is five-year-old anarchy…with permission!) I got a few judgemental looks out on a cold night with a small child wearing no coat and no shoes, but just a cardigan and tights… I wanted to shout: “Look, she owns five coats!” Luckily it wasn’t vodka I was buying. That would have been a bad look.
