Saturday, June 21, 2008

Six Hour Shopathon

For some women, six hours of clothes shopping might be fun. Entertaining. Enjoyable.

For me, the mere thought of traversing the mall makes me break out in hives. But when Mom calls and wants some help picking out some summer work shirts, of course I agree to go along. After all, spending time with Mom is nice, and besides, she sounded so desperate. Since it was past 8:00 pm when she called last night with the idea, it was a surprise to David when I finally rolled out of bed this morning. Surprise! The kids are all yours this morning. Just a couple of hours, though, no biggie.

Six hours later we arrived back at home, finding the house more or less intact and David's left eye only a little wiggly and twitchy. Both boys were accounted for, and neither of them had any major bruising or emergency room stickers. I, on the other hand, had about the worst headache ever and a new pair of jeans, that Mom bought me. I also had the experience of looking at, discussing, and doing a complex materials check on each and every women's shirt for sale in this city. The materials check was important, since it seems that this summer the material of choice for dressy tops is linen, which turns into a big ol' wrinkly mess as soon as you so much as breathe on it. So we did a lot of, "Oh, this one is cute. Wait, let's see how it holds up to this." Then we would grasp a chunk of the shirt tightly in one hand for a bit and check out the wrinkle factor.

Personally, wrinkles don't really bother me. I know I have an iron, but I'm not sure exactly where it is. But Mom takes the wrinkles a bit more seriously. So once a shirt passed the wrinkle test, the next thing we had to determine was whether or not this particular shirt would make a woman with an average body shape look approximately six months pregnant. An awful lot of the shirts did not pass this second test. Finally, before a shirt could make its way into the fitting room, it had to pass the "But is it too low cut?" Mom test. And of course, there was the hysterical "Does it look like I'm wearing bananas for sleeves?" test. I don't pay a whole heckuva lot of attention to the world of fashion, but there's some seriously strange sleeve-work going on out there, let me tell you.

When all that was said and done, we still had to try not to get anything green or lavender, since Mom said everything she already owns is one of those two colors. Then we had to avoid blue, too, 'cause everything she bought at the first two stores was some shade of blue.

I'm sorry, did you get a headache just reading about it?

I did have fun hanging out with my lovely mother, and she did buy me lunch and a pair of jeans. (I happened to tell her that the jeans I was wearing were my only pair, which they were, and that they didn't currently have a button, since it fell off one day and I'm too sewing-impaired to fix it. I think Mom was slightly appalled that I was walking around in public with unbuttoned jeans. No worries, Mom. These hips can hold up anything!)

3 comments:

The Finn Family said...

I am seriously laughing right now. This is how any shopping trip with my mom turns out. As a matter of fact, mid-May I took my mom shopping so that she could buy a shirt to wear to the family wedding we were going to. The funniest thing about that trip was not the fact that she tried on about 48557474 shirts from every single store in the mall, but instead that she was insistent on shopping in places like Vanity, Maurices, and Wet Seal. I could not make her understand that places like those were meant for teenagers, not 56 year old women. Heck, not for 32 year old women either. I begged her to look in places like Eddie Bauer, JcPenny, and Yonkers, although that backfired on me. She had found a very cute tank in Younkers that looked nice on her, but it was from the Ralph Lauren section. Once she decided to buy it (much to my relief and my wrong assumption that she had already looked at the price tag) she realized that this tank top was $79! Of course it immediately went back on the shelf and we quickly left the store as my mom recoiled in horror at the price of this one little shirt. (Mind, I would not have paid $79 for a tank top either, but I also would not have been shopping in the Ralph Lauren section!)

Ah, moms, you gotta love 'em. ;-)

Oh, and BTW, my mom never did buy a shirt that day. The day of the wedding she showed up in a cute white top and when I asked her where she found it she informed me that she got it, "From my closet! I forgot that I had it." Grrrrrrrr.

cindyMN said...

OMG!! We must allll have the same mother. Really. I dread when she comes to visit, because I have to take her shopping!!! She's from a very very small town. So when she gets up to see me, I have to take her shopping. Which could very well be hours at WALMART!!! (hate that place), and more hours at the mall!! And all the; does this look good on me? what about this? No, I need THIS shade of this burgendy, but not really like this, but with a grey to it. UGH!! I'm just cringing thinking of it. ha

Elissa J. Hoole said...

Shhhh...she just asked me for the link to my blog. We can't talk about her anymore! :D