Dear St. Peter's Family,

Getting Dressed

Colossians 3:12-17

Have you ever attempted to dress a three year old?  It should be an Olympic sport.  My theory is that three year olds are made of slippery elastic.  Sometimes you get lucky and they will do just what you want.  You ask them to raise their arms and they raise their arms.  You ask them to stick out their foot and they stick out their foot.  However, many of us have experienced the other side of that little angel.  All of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of a Three Stooges routine.  Whoever would have thought you could get hurt getting dressed?  Their strategy is quite ingenious.  First they try the limp limb maneuver.  This is a style of child combat in which the child’s arms or legs are only going to be moved if you move them.  It amounts to trying to dress a piece of wet spaghetti.  The other strategy is what I call “aggravated mime assault.”  What happens here is that the child will be asked to raise their right arm and the left arm will go up.  This lulls you into an idea that you simply need to start with the arm they raised. But no, just as you shift to accommodate, they reverse course.  And so the process continues with the legs and head and feet. I think yoga has a pose for only masters called “Jeans on Toddler”.  The parent will have the kid in one arm and the jeans in another arm.  The legs are kicking in the air and the parent is trying to work the jeans on like they would a pillowcase on a pillow.  This is when parents sustain injuries from little toes and fingers shoved in their nose and eyes.  I’ve seen grown men whimper in defeat at the damage an acorn sized fist can do. Fathers are typically (though not always) the worst at navigating these feats of dextrous dressings.  They are the ones who end up saying.  “Alright then, you dress yourself!” which the child happily does.  When I worked as a daycare teacher I could always tell when it was dad’s turn to dress their child.  Absolutely nothing matched on the child and you could tell the child put on their favorite of every type of clothing.