Sweater Weather: When Winter Doesn’t Feel Good

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and that you're keeping warm where you are! Living in Southern California, sometimes you forget the rest of the country (and half of the world) is experiencing chilly weather during the last two months of the year. The day after Thanksgiving, while on a hike, my three-year-old declared it was so hot she needed to swim, so we left the park and went straight to the beach. If you're holed-up somewhere right now, wearing mittens and a scarf inside and sitting directly over a heating vent you might want to stop reading - it's okay to be a heat hater in the deadest, dead of winter. You can frost me out. But lately it's been cold here, too - I'm talking low-50s cold, which in L.A. inspires all sorts of panic. (Last week a friend even found frost on her windshield!) So it's finally time to put away the swimsuits and force my kids to start wearing shoes, which, unless they are my shoes (the three-year-old rocks high-heeled ankle boots far better than me), they hate.

 

But worse than shoes, worse even than socks, are sweaters. If you are a three-year-old and a toddler used to being barefoot and wearing sundresses or maybe, at the most, a T-shirt and jeans, apparently nothing is more soul sucking than being asked to cover yourself with a sweater, which, according to my eldest, "doesn't feel good on my skin." "You know what feels worse?" I tell her, "a cold." "Please wear your sweater," I beg every morning before taking her to preschool, the rare sight of my visible breath validating my cause. Nevertheless, by pick-up time, there she is shoeless, sleeveless, usually, also pantless; along with the sweater, she's lost her leggings, and stands before me wearing only a sundress. Many of her classmates have similarly shed their layers, though we parents are all basically in parkas. I've tried reason, coercion and even threats to get her to wear more clothes in the cold weather but none of it works. Either she doesn't feel cold or her heavier clothes are just so uncomfortable to her that she'd rather shiver. Either way, it's a bummer. First, I really don't want my kids to be cold - and secondly, kids look so cute all bundled up in a bunch of puffy layers. The only thing cuter than a naked little toddler running about is a toddler wearing a sweater, scarf and some snow boots. But that won't be my kid-not either of them. Instead, my sun lovers are counting the days till summer. Feeling chilly? Sit down with some Rockabye Baby Lullaby Renditions of The Beach Boys and feel "The Warmth of the Sun."