An open letter to our extended family

hooligNSA

Ain't gonna work! Not till you have a kid does the full irrationality of your extended family sink in on you. YMMV though, so good luck

Just wait two or three decades and you'll find yourself sending useless junk to Baby Baby Jane.

I'm having this kind of experience even with my baby registry (my baby's due in less than 3 weeks)... and sit there wondering why I ever bothered to put one together, you know, thinking about what would be useful, what I, as a mother, believe in having. And then most people take a quick look and decide that they'd prefer to give me something I never wanted. And I have such guilt about returning items, too, because I can tell that they were given with a lot of thought & care. Just not my thought & care.

I'm resigning myself to it that one probably has to just accept it that people give the gifts they like or they would like rather than the ones the recipient would like.

@LK, well, the giver is paying, so the giver gets to give what s/he likes. Of course, one should actually try and find something the receiver would enjoy. But the receiver is Baby Jane here - and maybe she *likes* dresses? Because it *really* bugs her mom?

I have three nieces who just *love* princess stuff (and still get their lunches all over them, so wash'n'wear for the princess dresses is an added plus). The youngest one (who I hope will become an engineer!) just loves to sit in her princess dress and take trains and cars apart.

Me? I give the girls power tool kits and trains and books when I suppose I should be giving them tiaras. But I feel better that way.

And honestly, Jane, just let her slop up the frilly dresses. They are clothing, and probably clean, and when they are ripped after 3 washes you can make rags out of them. Just take one picture of Baby Jane in them inside of the first 30 seconds :) I am assuming that she doesn't care yet what she looks like. You are probably just afraid of what the other mothers will say at daycare :)

In about 4 years you might find yourself with a little girl who will wear nothing but skirts and dresses, like I did. It's an interesting 4-year-old phenomenon my friends and I have observed.

Our oldest is 8 and we are still going through this, but because of school dress codes.

You can encourage gift receipts ("She's growing so fast, so we don't know if anything will fit, you see") or take it in the spirit in which it was intended or re-gift to needier folks who might want dresses. Freecycle in my area always has people wanting baby stuff. I've sent big boxes of baby stuff (like the 500,000 receiving blankets we had for Bun) to Iraq, where soldiers donate them to orphanages (see info here at ParentHacks.

Amazon wish list helps, too, if the extended family is e-commerce savvy...

I totally agree and have a similar problem with relatives. I preferred to put the kids in practical clothes with knees (big crawlers, only later walkers). Now, though, the problem is that my daughter flat out refuses to wear dresses. It usually isn't worth it to me to fight (though I have occasionally triumphed to get that 30 second picture, or the visit to great-grandma). This is mostly because I don't really care what she wears 99.9% of the time. I remember spending a lot of time in uncomfortable clothes when I was little and I just don't see the point. The good news? Clothes with tags can be resold at kids resales easily, or will be very welcome as a donation or hand-me-down.

We also started out with no dresses but then received a bunch of baby clothes from a friend that had dressed her daughter very "girly". We've since discovered that there are a number of advantages not to the dresses themselves, but to putting her in TIGHTS (with a dress): no bare area between pants and socks and also no baby socks which always seem to be too small, too big, and in any size hard to keep on. Of course, she's not very active at day care yet, so I don't know how tights hold up to crawling when she begins doing that.

@JKS: Tights are a desaster when they start running outside - they get broken at a rhythm of one per day.

@FEP: My daughter start wanting feminine clothes around age 4, too. Now at 8 she alternates.

I second the advice of putting the clothes she gets given and if they get spoiled, so be it. Do take a picture first.

BTW, my parents keep giving me clothes that require dry cleaning, hand washing, long hours of ironing, or a mixture of these. She doesn't get to wear those very much.

They also give her woollen stuff for the winter, although she's always hot and never ever wears wool (and I told them so). Some parents never listen.

We determined very early on that we'd not buy her any stuffed animals, fuzzy fleece blankets, or almost *anything* pink, as those would be more than adequately supplied by friends and relatives. This has worked out just fine in practice.

@FEP: For mine it was at about 30 months; she doesn't always refuse pants but really wants dresses. I don't know where she got the idea, since I don't think she's ever seen Mom or any of the daycare workers wearing one. I presume it's the influence of the Disney Princesses. She doesn't do particulary "girly" stuff; she just wants the dress. It makes getting to the potty easier, so I'm all for it. :)

I've been thinking about this some more. What I found frustrating about frilly dresses for infants and toddlers wasn't their sturdiness or washability. Be honest, they're not that hard to launder (I'm a survival of the fittest girl when it comes to laundry. If it doesn't survive on regular wash & dry, then that's too bad). It was more the fact that they required ironing. I don't have time to iron in the mad dash to get the kids to daycare or church. Maybe you could steer the well meaning relatives towards knits. Like Hannah Anderson or Landsend.

Dresses can have a lot of things going for them. They are hard to crawl in, but they are fabulous for twirling and they aren't tight around the waist. And the best part is that you don't have to argue about whether the top matches the bottom!

Hmmm, I guess I hadn't really thought of the advantages of the dress. The potty-training thing doesn't apply, yet, but the matching thing, well, FEP, I hadn't thought about that before---that's brilliant! :) One issue is that Baby Jane is still primarily crawling (although she has started to walk---yay! and yikes!), so clothes with knees are preferable. The other issue is probably related to the observation by WiseWoman: I guess I don't want to be known as the mom who dresses her kid in totally inappropriate clothing for daycare. So yeah, maybe there is some embarrassment factor there, too.

Anyway, we usually try to figure out where the dress came from (if no gift receipt) and try to exchange it. If this doesn't work, we donate it or pass it on.