Defensive Shopping

It's not easy buying clothes for Rachel.  If I see anything I think she may like, it must pass a series of  tests that I call, is it Rachel proof?  If it's a sweatshirt or hoodie, does it have a zipper?  If so, it's out.  Does it have buttons or snaps?  Out!  She chews everything, so if its a pullover hoodie with strings, she can have it, but the strings are removed.

The second hardest thing is finding clothes for a young woman who weighs 102 pounds soaking wet and is 6 feet tall with long, long arms. That's runway model territory, so you'd think it would be easy to find something, but models are allowed to wear beautiful clothes.  Rachel is not.  She will chew and destroy anything beautiful.  For that reason alone, we try to shop for less expensive items that can be bought in bulk and rotated through her wardrobe.

I was so sad when she outgrew toddler clothes and her fleece one piece footed winter pajamas.   About 10 years ago, those types of pajamas made a comeback in adult sizes, but they're so hard to find.  Come this time of year, all of the women in my family go on the hunt for jammies that will keep Rachel warm and cozy.  Sometimes we luck out and don't have to look any further than the closest Target or Meijer's.  When we find them, we buy them out.  Seriously.  Then we burn up the phone lines when we see them, encouraging one another to hit another branch of those stores to buy them out, too.  It's greedy, I know, but this garment is the only one we buy that has zippers, and, well, they don't last a season so we go through them quite quickly.

Winter coats are particularly hard to buy.  They all have inescapable bells and whistles Rachel loves to chew best: zippers, snaps, buttons and velcro.  She got two new coats last year and destroyed the industrial strength zippers on her bus rides to and from school in no time at all.  I had thought I'd been so clever buying coats with zippers and then hidden snaps that covered the zippers.  She'd put on a perfectly good coat in the morning and come home with bent snaps and missing zipper teeth.  Coats are expensive--as if you didn't know.  This year we wised up and my husband took the perfectly good & incredibly warm, but zipper challenged coats to a seamstress.  With not too many questions, she assured my husband that she could put a zipper in anything.

Fingers crossed here that she's the saint she claims to be.  If I can get another year out of that Eddie Bauer down filled coat, I'll be grateful.  It keeps her so warm and that's another challenge for Rachel because on top of the rest of the shitty hand she was dealt, Rachel has Raynaud's Syndrome and she is never warm enough.  Even in summer, this slip of thing with no body fat to spare, wears hoodies.

Well it's back to online shopping for Rachel for me.  I'm down to only long sleeved shirts, bras, socks & belts and then I get to call it a day.  If you run across those jammies I described, be sure to drop me a line.  I can use all the help I can get!