February 22nd

 Picture-A-Day:

This is my sweater collecting snowflakes while standing outside waiting for the bus to pick up my Kindergartener. This winter I accumulated 3 long, cardigan-type sweaters. I love them. I used to be a big sweater person when I lived in MN. You need sweaters when you live in MN. After I moved to IN, I just kind of stopped wearing my sweaters. It wasn't until I'd lived here for a few years that I realized I don't wear sweaters anymore. However, in my old drafty house I often have to wear layers to keep warm in the winter. And I guess now that I'm in my 30's, and have become a bit of a hippie, long sweaters seem more appealing to me than my old hoodies. Besides, the old hoodies from college are (gasp!) well over 10 years old!

It's amazing how fast time goes as you get older, isn't it? You look at an article of clothing and suddenly realize it's 10 years old!!!! And you go, "well, it's still good!" You can't imagine, when you're in high school or college, wearing clothes that are 10 years old or more, becasue you'd have to have had them since you were 6 or 8 or 10, and that's just ridiculous. But once you're 20 or so... you stop growing (hopefully), and you can just keep wearing and wearing and wearing the same old clothes without even noticing the years go by. Until you have a baby and suddenly your old clothes from college don't fit anymore, so you hide them in the attic hoping that someday they'll fit again. Maybe when they're 50 years old! Ha! But, you know, the baggy hoodies and things like that, you don't necessarily grow out of.

I had a funny realization the other day. Twenty years ago or so, it was popular to wear your clothes baggy. I have a zip-up hooded sweatshirt from probably 1998-ish. That's only 13 years ago. It wasn't super baggy, because I think at that time the baggy style was on its way out, and the super-skin-tight style was on its way in. So this sweatshirt was somewhere in between. Now tight is in, and whaddya know, my sweatshirt is still in style on me! Because it was semi-baggy then, and now it's pretty tight (when I say "tight," I mean "not baggy," but it can also mean "cool", which I think is fitting in this case)! Ha ha, that cracked me up.

All this to say... I now have 3 long, warm sweaters and I pretty much trade them around from day to day. I love sweaters. And coffee.