Style, baby.

After witnessing from afar as my good friend, superstar, and now LAW SCHOOL GRAD (*ahem* I should mention surviving the second half of 3L while concurrently enduring first and second trimester of pregnancy) Laynie suffered the initial loss (and subsequent, thankfully, recovery) of her son's "special moments" outfits from his infancy.... I'm sorry, I got lost talking about how awesome Laynie is, where was I?.... Oh. Anyway. Laynie thought she'd thrown away all of her son's clothes, including the ones from those huge moments in a baby's life, and I completely and totally felt her pain and mortification. Thankfully, as I said, she found them, but in the meantime I got all kinds of colors of paranoid and wound up rifling through all 8 gigantic tubs of Punky baby clothes to pull out her important first outfits.

It's strange, how fast 15 months seems to have flown until I look at her earliest outfits and her shoes (OMG the tiny newborn SHOES!!! Not that she ever wore them, but OMG) and I realize how much she's grown, and how far we've come. From the tiny little onesies that I dressed her so carefully in to the frilly dresses I thought were a great idea when I bought them before she was born and then realized...okay, back to onesies.... and holy shit, TINY BABBY!... *cuteness coma, please pause... coherence to follow shortly*

I think it's important to stop every so often as a parent to stop and reflect on the path you traveled. I can't believe she's 15 months now, walking, and talking, and abusing the dog willingly and willfully speaking her opinions. And sometimes it just seems like such mindnumbing routine and such a pain in the ass to tell her again, DO NOT STAND ON THAT SCOOTER CAR, YOU WILL FALL, SIT THE FUCK DOWN....when I look at her little nightgowns from 15 months ago and remember that tiny little blob.

The outfit selection was small in the end -- only maybe 4 or 5 dresses (and her Bears cheerleader outfit), mostly from portraits, including these:

4 month portraits

The dress she wore to A.'s cousin's wedding, which will always be a favorite dress of mine.

The Bears cheerleader outfit

First Christmas, 2008

Also making the cut is her prolific Misfits onesie, because seriously, how badass is a kid in a Misfits onesie?



And, while I don't have a good picture of it, her Winnie the Pooh nightie, complete with Pooh mittens. Which was also her going home, um...outfit.


In my defense, when it came time to bring Punky home from the hospital, I knew all of three things about babies:

1.) I had just had one.
2.) They are tiny.
3.) They cry a lot.

So it wasn't my wisest parenting choice, 72 hours postpartum, to dress her in a Winnie the Pooh nightie and swaddled in a shitton of blankets, in February. In Indiana. (To be fair, it was unseasonably warm that week.) But look, when it was time to go home, she was completely unconscious, and I didn't want to wake her up, just to dress her in a ceremonial outfit, drive 15 minutes home, then dress her in something similar to, if not the same thing as, she was wearing before we bothered her to get her dressed in a going-home outfit. So, it was a Winnie the Pooh nightie and it served its purpose well.

The outfits continue to circulate through the closet and dresser, some have already been passed on to friends with baby girls and the rest have had a hand-me-down freeze put on them pending the newest addition to the family (not mine, I swear, my uterus is empty!), the days continue to turn into months, and the little blob of mush continues to turn into a precocious, hilarious little girl. And mark my words, she will have the most awesome outfits for all of the major events along the way.

Added for KL... yeah, that's right.

Daddy's socks can also double as leggings.
MAKE IT WORK!