In Which I Declare Dirty the New Clean
By Glinda
As I have mentioned before, the Munchkin is playing T-ball this year. Nothing excites him more than being able to put on his uniform, which is a blue jersey with his name on the back and his sparkling white pants.
Wait, did I just say sparkling white pants?
Listen, obviously the T-ball league is run by a bunch of men, because no woman in their right mind would ever sentence another woman to the laundry hell that is a five year old in white pants. Who plays on grass. Which is sometimes muddy. Which results in pants that wind up being not so sparkling white at the end of a game.
A fellow mom was sitting next to me as we watched practice last week, and she asked me what I used to get the Munchkin’s pants clean. She told me that she didn’t want to use bleach, but had heard that Oxi-Clean worked well.
I had to fess up that I do use a bit of bleach, else the pants would already be gray-green from the knee down.
She told me that nothing she had used got the pants clean, so she just went ahead and bought a few other pairs.
It was at that point that I wanted to leap off my folding chair and cry, “We must stop the insanity! Who gives a crap if our sons’ pants are not pure white? Does it make us bad mothers if they are not?”
The answer is, of course not.
But if only we lived in a world where dirty pants were worn with pride. They would be the mark of a dedicated player and a mother who is too proud to get rid of her child’s badge of honor for sacrificing their body for that ground ball.
Maybe someday.
But until then, I’m sticking with the bleach.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:31 am
I’m with you! Why bother washing them over and over again, just for them to get dirty and muddied up again? 😉
March 18th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Oh you’ll get over the clean pants thing pretty fast because if he really gets into sports you’ll be washing those uniforms every night because there will be either be a game or practice 3-4 nights a week even if he plays in just one league.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:26 am
There’s clean and stained, and there’s clean and white. You can bet your butt if you simply made sure your sons pants were clean but still stained, some mom would make a comment. And yeah, white baseball pants were invented by men.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Really, it is amazing that white pants prevail in so many contact sports. Contact with mud and grass, that is. I think camouflage pants would be perfect. In fact, somebody has already thought of it: http://tinyurl.com/2e4lgm
Happy bleaching, dear. 😉
March 18th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
You’d think they’d have the sense to have practice uniforms and competition uniforms, the pristine whites. I mean, they do look adorable in their clean, white uniforms, but there is a reason for beige in this world.
March 19th, 2008 at 12:27 am
Uniforms should compliment the soil of the locale. Brown or rust for Southern red clay, olive for the grassy plains, beige for sandy areas, grey for the city streets, and neopolitian for those after game trips to DQ.
March 21st, 2008 at 9:40 pm
…and I’ve never understood elementary schools that have white shirts as part of their uniforms. It gets pretty ugly after lunch!