Pleading the Case for More Toddler Undergarment Diversity

The time has finally arrived, folks:  Skye is potty trained!  For the most part!   Giddy exclamation points all around!  So, to reward our daughter for doing her business in the toilet, I offered to buy her — wait for it — MORE UNDERWEAR.  Because that’s the kind of big spender I am.

“I want underpants with cars on them!” she exclaimed with genuine excitement.

“Excellent choice!” I replied, also genuinely excited, because of her request:  CARS!  Something that was decidedly not a princess or fairy.  While I don’t actively discourage the princess nonsense, I have to admit:  I have a hard time masking my disdain for it.  “Put on some freakin’ pants,” I grumble as Tinkerbell appears on the iPad, her butt practically hanging out of her teensy green dress.  “Would it kill ya to eat a sandwich?” I ask Ariel with concern.  “You don’t need a man to save you — just drag your lazy ass out of bed!” I yell at Sleeping Beauty, trying to knock some sense into her pretty head.

But I shouldn’t blame the princesses, I suppose.  What can you expect when almost all of their mothers are dead, their stepmothers are jealous and evil, their fathers are overbearing, and their bodacious bodies are borne out of the perverted minds of sexually frustrated animators?  No wonder they’re always confiding in animals.  I’d be singing with a lobster, too, if those were the only people I knew.

So cars?  Heck, yeah!  I might even spring for two packs of underwear at this rate.

“Take your pick,” I smiled, magnanimously waving at the rack of undergarments.

“FAIRIES!” Skye yelled, grabbing a pack adorned with the tiny, bewinged, pantless whores… er, I mean, magical creatures.  I gripped the handle of our Target shopping cart, crushed.

“But what about the cars?  You wanted cars!” I implored, unsuccessfully trying not to sound desperate.

“No cars,” she said.

“But –” I started to protest, when my eyes finally landed on the rack.  She was right; there were no cars in sight.  Not on the rack of girls’ undergarments, that is, which was limited to princesses and fairies and Dora… oh my!  I whirled around — imagine I did this in slow motion for amazing dramatic effect — and let out an equally dramatic huff when I caught sight of the boys’ rack, FILLED with — you guessed it — CARS underwear. And Spider-Man.  And Superman.  Hmpf.  Quelle suprise, I thought… because I always think in French when I’m recounting a story to make people think I am just that sophisticated… with a dramatic arching of the eyebrow.

“There are the cars, Skye!”  I pointed to distract her from noticing me chucking the Fairy pants behind us.  “On the other rack.”

Notice I said “other” — not “boys'”.  Because if I had made the mistake of saying we were getting (GASP!) BOYS’ underwear, she would have silly fairies on her butt right now instead of the more bad-ass Lightning McQueen.  In fact, there are several girls in Skye’s preschool class who wear “boys'” underwear with Superman and the like, presumably desiring similar undergarment diversity.  Or possessing parents with a similar fairy prejudice.  (YES!  I admit it — I’m an anti-Fairite, okay?!)

To the Children’s Underwear Makers of the World, I would just like to humbly request that you consider mixing it up a bit.  There are girls who don’t want to wear Cinde-freakin’-rella all the time, just as I’m sure there are boys who don’t want to don Superman because that idiot wears his underwear on the outside.  And then?  I won’t have to have conversations like this with my daughter:

Why is there a hole in the front of my car underwear?

For, um, ventilation.

What’s ven…tation?

Uhhhhh… Like a breeze.  Sort of like what passes through Sleeping Beauty’s ears.

I kid! I kid!  I’m sure Sleeping Beauty KICKED ASS on her SATs and becomes a rocket scientist in the sequel:  Engineering Beauty with a Healthier-Sized Waist.  *Ahem*