Shopping for clothing is frustrating. Honestly, it always is, for me, but I just got reminded of why maternity clothes are going to add extra complications without removing any constraints. An example follows:

As I go from “kinda chubby” to “where did that belly come from”, I’m running out of clothes to wear. I have two pairs of pants, a handful of solid-color t-shirts, and 5 sweaters/fleeces that are large enough to fit over the shirts, at least for now, but only 3 of which are appropriate for work. In addition, I have one or two jumper-style dresses that still fit, and a few lovely new shirts from my mother-in-law. Not quite enough for a work wardrobe, so I used some gift cards from my mother and grandmother and went shopping online. I found two beautiful sweaters, a cute skirt and two nice shirts that looked work-appropriate on Motherhood Maternity’swebsite. They were shipped to me last week, so they were here when I got back from a trip to LA. Five new things, sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, two of the five were not exactly what I’d expected. Amusingly, they are the two that are no longer on the website: a brown billowy top and a grey empire-waist sweater. The top is wearable: it’s a very thin fabric, but if I can layer underneath it I might even be able to wear it to work, and I could certainly wear it on weekends (with layers. It really doesn’t stand alone). So that’s okay.

The sweater is actually nicer than I thought I was getting—heavier weight, if a little scratchy. The scratchy is what tipped me off, though, to the fact that it’s not cotton/nylon/acrylic as I’d thought. It’s wool/nylon/acrylic, as my now itchy, pink-spotted hands can attest. I am terribly disappointed, especially since their return policy is not that great. ( I should be able to walk into a store and exchange it, as long as I can find something else. Maybe I can find the undershirts I need to go with the other one!)

Looking through their website, they do list fabric content most of the time, so I suspect I screwed it up… but that doesn’t make me any less disappointed.

Left on an answering machine:

"This message is for *name*.  
If you are not *name*, please hang up or disconnect. 
If you are *name*, please continue to listen to this message. 
There will now be a 3 second pause on this message. 
By continuing to listen to this message, you acknowledge you are *name*."

The answering machine is clearly insufficiently voice-activated.

I went shopping last night at 10:30. I was thrilled that my local supermarket was still open, because I really wanted a nice cup of black tea with milk before bedtime. (I had tea, but we’d been out of milk for a couple days and been too busy to go shopping.)

I got the milk, and a few other things that I walked past which looked good: spaghetti, apples, a frozen pot-pie for lunch today (Amy’s Kitchen is the best!) and some black tea to take to work, because my stash there had run out. They didn’t have my favorite tea, but they had a nice looking Twinings English Breakfast, and an Irish Breakfast. I took the English, and was pretty happy.

This afternoon, I pulled the tea out of my bag in the office and discovered, to my horror, that I actually bought DECAFFINATED English Breakfast tea. Woe! Misery! Weak tea! It’s not actually terrible—it just tastes more like a second infusion than a first.

I already knew not to shop when hungry, or when craving sweets. Now I also know not to shop when sleepy…