The perfect baby outfit: fact or fiction?

While I was home in Illinois visiting my dad and sister, my sister and I got the chance to do some shopping for baby clothes. (Dad respectfully declined, especially the second evening we went out.)

We were essentially heading out on an informal search for the "perfect" baby outfit. We spent 2 evenings, almost 2 hours each, scouring 4 different stores. We examined outfit after outfit, probably covering a good 95% of each store's baby-clothes inventory. Needless to say, it was lots of fun.

In one store, I actually felt like I was pretty close to finding the "perfect" outfit for Baby Girl, until Nancy reminded me (twice, actually, before I turned away from all the cute clothes and listened) I was in the boys' section. Oops. Although I am very encouraged that if Baby Girl turns out to be Baby Boy, or I have a boy someday, there will be no lack of adorable things to dress him in.

We learned a lot along the way. For one, while there are zillions of adorable puppy outfits for boys, there are exactly zero for girls. What if a baby girl likes dogs? Or what if dog-lover likes babies? There was nothing to fill this niche. Nancy found a cute overall outfit, fortunately, that could easily be transformed into girl clothes with the addition of a pink or purple onesie. It came home with us.

We liked anything with animals (bonus points if the animals were a different texture than the clothing itself), flowers, ladybugs or strawberries. We liked pretty much everything pink, and all dresses. Lavender, yellow, orange, red and green were excellent color choices as well. We also liked anything that resembled what we would've worn as kids. Did I leave anything out? Basically, we liked it all.

I'll actually be looking forward to diaper blow-outs and spit-up incidents because then I'll have an excuse to pull some more adorable clothes out of the closet. And I think we're both considering careers in baby-clothes design.

One new trend we discovered (or maybe it's not new??) is that clothing designers seem to associate whales with baby girls. Over and over again we saw cute pink onesies and outfits and hooded towels with smiling whales on them. We hope these girls don't grow up to be either obese or anorexic. Assuming they don't, add them to the list of things we thought were adorable.

In case you're wondering, I did, actually, make a purchase. Just one, you ask? I found some cute khaki capris on sale at Kohl's, and just couldn't resist. I have no idea how I resisted everything else.

In the end, we found that there's no such thing as the perfect baby outfit (maybe that's why I resisted buying more than the capris?), but that there are still many perfect-in-themselves baby outfits. I don't think any of us were wondering this, but Baby Girl is definitely going to be cute!