Motor Mania

Isaac has never cared much about his clothes, but that's beginning to change.

It has been coming on gradually, beginning with pair of pajamas with tractors on them that his paternal grandparents sent him for Christmas. He immediately loved them, and at first even refused to take them off.

But even though I have long suspected that Isaac would love wearing clothing entirely covered in vehicles, I still avoided buying it. I figured that until he began to actually express a preference, I was going to continue buying him the clothes I thought were cool.

This took longer than I had expected, perhaps due to his easy-going nature. Many of his playmates, both boys and girls, began caring about their clothes before they turned two. Some of the kids are fashion plates, insisting on changing outfits multiple times, and some are idiosyncratic, only wearing certain types of clothes -- always boots, or dresses, or sports themes.

And the clothing preferences of many of the kids are defined in opposition to whatever their parents suggest. (This probably continues long after the Terrible Twos are left behind!) But Isaac only suffers from garden-variety opposition, and he doesn't waste it on clothing selection. Perhaps he would still prefer to wear his tractor pajamas every day, but after I explained a few times that we only wear pajamas to bed, he easily gave in.

However, one morning last week, out of the blue, Isaac said, "Let's go to the kid store today and buy a race-car shirt."

I could have easily distracted Isaac from this request, but I thought it would be interesting to see what it was like to shop for clothes with a child who really wanted to buy something, let alone something in particular. So we went to our favorite second-hand store where for the first time ever, we looked at the shirts together -- he usually heads straight for the toy section.

And there was, in fact, a race-car shirt! Unfortunately it was a set of matching NASCAR overalls and t-shirt, and it was absolutely hideous. So I lied and told Isaac it wasn't his size, and happily he took it in stride and didn't insist on buying the shirt anyway. Thank goodness for that easy-going nature.

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We did buy two vehicle t-shirts, though. One shirt is blue and orange with a yellow VW Bug dune buggy on the front, very cheerful and cute and perfect for a toddler.

The other shirt, pictured here, is bizarrely inappropriate for a small child. It's pseudo-vintage, so the black was artificially faded, and the fabric is thin and soft like a old t-shirt. As you can see, on the front is a late 1960s muscle car with tendrils of smoke coming out of the souped-up engine. And the smoke? Click on the picture to get an enlarged view of it. Yep, the smoke takes the form of Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar!

I found it so preposterous that I just had to buy it. Although Isaac doesn't care. He now calls it his "race car shirt."

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Isn't that a terrible smile on Isaac's face? It's getting hard to get him to pose for a picture.