"Handsome"

The other day Seth came upstairs in his church clothes. This is very unusual because he normally REFUSES to wear a certain pair of green corduroy pants because they are "church" clothes. Most of the time I can hardly get him to wear clothes without holes in them, and it turns out that most of his clothes have holes in them because he is pretty hard on them. On this particular day he was going on a field trip and really wanted to dress up. He insisted that there was girl in his class named Isabel that wore a skirt to school, so it was okay for him to wear church clothes. I didn't feel super understanding and compassionate at that point in the day (I am clearly NOT a morning person), and I didn't want him to ruin his only white shirt, so I told him to go change into normal school clothes. You see, we have three very distinct categories of clothing in our house. They are: holey clothes that are obviously stained and have large holes in them, school clothes which have smaller holes and less obvious stains, and church clothes which generally don't have holes in them, but may have a small stain or two. Seth insisted that he wanted to wear the later of the three. I sent him down to his room three times with no success. I was even starting to get that look of maniacal fury in my eye, and he still would not change his clothes. So I sent Jared down to talk to him. About 10 minutes later Jared came up and explained to me that Seth wanted to look "handsome" and had told him that I told him that he had to wear church clothes in order to look handsome. I remembered that on the day of his Valentine's party he didn't have any clean clothes except church clothes so when I was tryng to talk him into wearing them to school, I had told him that the girls would give him more candy if he looked handsome. Now he apparently thinks that in order to look handsome he has to wear his church clothes. Sigh. I love that the things I tell my kids almost always go full circle, and end up confusing them more then helping them. Anyway, he looked very handsome that day.