Allergies

My kids have lately become aware that many of their peers have allergies of one type or another and they are feeling a little left out.

"What am I allergic to, Mom?" Caleb keeps asking me. "I must be allergic to something."

I have recently come to realize that my poor children do suffer from an allergy and it is the same one: They are allergic to warm clothing.

Consider first, Grace, who is perhaps the most hot-blooded creature on earth. When it is my night to put her to bed, I make sure to bundle up good, because even though she will be wearing her summer jammies, she will be throwing covers off complaining that it is so hot in here! She turns her fan on as high as it can go until her room becomes a wind tunnel and my teeth are chattering, but she is still too hot.

Now fortunately for my children, our weather here doesn't require that we bundle up too often. But recently, we were preparing for a bike ride on a very cold and downright wintry day. This is how Grace was dressed (and yes I know her clothes doesn't match - that's another story):

After a few minutes of arguing and showing her the temperature gauge and the trees bending in the wind outside, she agreed to dress a little more warmly. This was what she came up with:


I suppose there's something nice about living in a place where you can where flip-flops year round and not worry about frostbite.

Anyway, then we have Caleb. Now, he is not opposed to dressing warmly during the day. He waits until nighttime when the temperature drops to state his objection to clothing.

"Big boys do not wear shirts to bed," he adamantly insists.

Now, I'm not totally sure how he came to this conclusion. Now that our nights are cold, his Daddy can be found wearing a shirt to bed, and sometimes even a wool hat on his head, because there's (ahem) not a lot of hair up there anymore to provide warmth.

Caleb is very proud of his new bare-chested status and posed for this picture at bedtime the other night:



And that brings us to Joshua. We don't even bother to put his jammies on before he goes to sleep because it only takes him about ten seconds to unzip them and fling them onto the floor in disdain.

I recently just put him to bed with his clothes still on (because he can't undress himself from regular clothes yet), but as soon as he was put in his bed, he began writhing around trying to get himself undressed. Pretty soon, the neck of his shirt was stuck around his waist and he had this determined little look on his face that said Must. Get. Clothes. Off. Now!

Of all of my children, though, I can understand Joshua's need to be free of clothes. The nannies in Chinese orphanages are well-known for dressing babies in so many layers of clothing that they can actually have underdeveloped muscles, kind of like this:

We had always assumed they did it to keep children warm, but when Phil dressed him like that for fun recently, we discovered the real reason they do it: all those layers of clothing act like a straight-jacket and slow him way down.

Maybe if we keep dressing him like this, we can stay out of Urgent Care : )