Day 138: Undies and Outers, Speech and Baseball

The Son announced the other day that he needed new under­wear.  Well, knock me down with a feather.  This is a kid who will do just about any­thing to avoid hav­ing to be involved, even remotely, with new cloth­ing and/or shop­ping of any kind.

His acknowl­edge­ment of need­ing new under­wear was the sur­prise; the need, how­ever, was not.  Here’s a boy who’s grown about 11 inches and put on at least 15 pounds in the past two years — still squeez­ing him­self into Hanna Ander­s­son size 150 undies!  In case you’re not famil­iar with Euro siz­ing, that’s a 5’8″, 115 lb. 13-year-old wear­ing a size designed, at max­i­mum, to fit some­one mea­sur­ing 5’2″ and weigh­ing 95 lbs.  If The Son were a car­toon char­ac­ter, that under­wear would make him a soprano instead of his real-life bass.

Speech Ther­apy — $60.00
His sec­ond ses­sion.  I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see him emerge after 45 min­utes with a paper filled with writ­ing!  The ther­a­pist had given him an open­ing line and had him take it from there.  It was pro­duc­tive and I could tell that The Son felt good about the session.

All this week I’ve been ques­tion­ing my deci­sion to give this ther­apy a try.  After all, I have to pay out-of-pocket and The Son really doesn’t have an offi­cial diag­no­sis.  Sign­ing up for speech ther­apy was a real leap of faith.  As petty as it sounds, it’s going to be eas­ier to spend that money if I get to see con­crete results like this every week.

Old Navy — ($20.99)
This was our first stop on the Great Under­wear Search of ’08.  I took the oppor­tu­nity to take in the wool pea­coat The Daugh­ter bought her­self on New Year’s Eve — one of the tog­gle but­tons was barely hang­ing on.  I was hop­ing for an even exchange for another coat.

The good news was that the employee hap­pily exchanged the coat with­out a hitch.  On top of that, the price had been reduced even fur­ther so the clerk pro­vided me with an Old Navy gift card for the price difference.

The bad news was they didn’t have a sin­gle pack­age of men’s briefs in a size small for The Son.

We ended up strik­ing out at Ross and  K & G Men’s Ware­house, too.

T.J. Maxx – $6.45
Here we finally (hope­fully) hit under­wear pay­dirt.  The selec­tion of size Small briefs was pathet­i­cally, well, small.  We ended up reject­ing a pack­age of Nau­tica briefs because the waist­band was actu­ally wider than the fab­ric.  Who designs these things and why would they make the waist­bands wider than the actual brief?

The Son finally decided to give the Alfani basic briefs a try.  They only had one pack­age in his size.  It will be just my luck that The Son will like this brand and size and I’ll spend the next 3 months try­ing to find addi­tional packages.

You know, when I signed up for the par­ent­hood gig, I was pre­pared for tem­per tantrums and sleep depri­va­tion and snotty teenagers but no one told me I’d expend so much time and effort search­ing the globe for a par­tic­u­lar brand of under­wear or spend a month’s salary try­ing to find an accept­able pair of socks.

Base­ball reg­is­tra­tion — $165.00
After three years I’m almost used to the idea that base­ball starts in Jan­u­ary.  Well, reg­is­tra­tion and try-outs are in Jan­u­ary.  The meet­ings will start in March.  Then come the prac­tices.  I’d bet­ter get out the hair clip­pers and make sure they’re oiled because before you know it I’ll be shav­ing the boy’s head in antic­i­pa­tion of the offi­cial base­ball season.

Here’s to hop­ing that his team wins a few more games this year.  

Related posts:

1. Day 164: Gifts and Underwear
2. Day 166: Colonics, Under­wear, Gro­ceries, Bed­ding, and Speech Therapy
3. Day 167: Stu­pid Tax, Co-Pay, more Under­wear, & Choco­late Milk
4. Day 295: No-Spend Day
5. Day 212: Indoor Base­ball Practice