Pajama Tirade!

Searching online for the general price of toddler jammies. Going to the outlets in G'burg next week, and I'm not buying it just cause it's Osh Kosh or Baby Gap. They need to beat Wal-Mart & Target's prices for me, please! So I check out a major retail store's site and search for girl toddler sleepwear.

Gah! All Disney, all princess, except for one token Dora (throwing our Hispanic chicas a bone because Disney refuses to touch their ethnicity with a feature-length film?) But that's just my minor beef:

Why are we mommies expected to shell out extra money to the Disney corporation for the honor of advertising their characters on our children's chests, when our kids barely know who these animated figments are? Every jammie on the page was giving free rent to a corporate character. The 2nd page had cartoon-free jammies, two of them. $9.99. One had cats on it. We're into cats right now, I thought, "me-ow, right up our alley." (Get it, alley? I'm not my wittiest after midnight, sorry.) The cartoon character ones were selling for $12.99 and up. Honestly. I don't get it.

I've been informed by a few older (but wiser?) friends who have children older than my own that I might as well start dressing her in Princess this and Dora that now, because in a year or two I won't have a choice at all in what she likes and wears anyway. Yes, a colleague, a teacher with a masters' degree, told me this. To her face, I rolled my eyes. In my head, "the heck you say!" Well really, by this logic, when she's 10 and tells me she's going to watch reruns of Southpark (you know it will still be on Comedy Central), I'm supposed to shrug and buy her a nice Cartman T-shirt?

Now, to be fair, there's nothing objectionable about these little girl icons, besides their narrow vision of ethnicities and occasionally being a little too "tee-hee" for me. I have no major issue with the afore-mentioned characters. Dora is at least educational, and anything you buy from a PBS show gets its profits sent back to more educational programming, so I'm cool with the inevitable Elmo birthday party or two, etc. And except for the extreme overuse of the most obnoxious shade of magenta around, the Disney Princesses haven't done anything to annoy me personally. Yet. But why do these major retailers seem to think that I need no other option for my kid's PJ's? They're selling them in 12 months sizes! At 12 months, how many Disney movies could they have seen, let alone bonded with the characters? (Hmm, maybe all the little 12 month olds DO know their Cinderellas from their Ariels, and my 19-monther is just not up with the trends! Ack!)

But why not shapes? Why not numbers and letters and basic neighborhood vocab like trees and dogs and cars? I love "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid", but do I need to advertise that fact on my kid's shirt (she's seen neither, by the way, we may work on that this summer, but I doubt she'd be all that interested after "Under the Sea: is over. It's all downhill from there anyway.)

*sigh* Ok, tirade about relatively unimportant things over.

But I gotta tell ya, if I'm going to be expected to shell out extra cash for advertising space on my daughter, it's going to look something like this: