Nursery clothes vs everyday clothes

[ailbhe]

Elsenet, someone remarked that her daughter has nursery clothes which are not suitable for everyday use, so she needs new things to wear at weekends.

I'm confused. Weekends are two days long. How is that everyday?

And do kids really do more messy things at nursery than at home with their parents? Linnea's always cleaner after times in creches than after time with me at home, presumably because they can't bath her so painting etc is more restrained.

But everyday meaning "two days a week" bothered me.

Comments

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

Colin does MUCH messier things at nursery than at home (well, at least more often). In fact it's great, it frees me of all guilt about whether I'm letting him get messy enough. (Think "Mummy, I rolled in the mud!" plus multi-coloured hair and feet on a regular basis :-)

I don't understand the concept of different clothes for weekends though!

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Yeh, ditto. It's great that nursery will let them get covered in assorted gunk and then hose them down for you, so they don't need to do it at home.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

We don't have different clothes for weekends either, never have. (My dad wears work shirts on Saturdays which I think is going a bit far, but 40 years of the habit is probably too long to break now.)

But I am not bothered by 'everyday' meaning 'two days a week' in this case - it's being used as 'ordinary', not 'every day'. So the world divides into 'nursery' and 'ordinary' and that makes some sense to me.

[ailbhe]

I can see how that would happen - falls into the same box as "literally" meaning "figuratively" and people stop thinking about what they're saying.

[webhill.livejournal.com]

My kids just have clothes. I mean, ok, Lilah still MOSTLY wears what I give her to wear, and so I can arbitrarily say "this item of clothing is just for special occasions and this one is ok for anytime except when we are in synagogue" and blah blah blah. However, Naomi chooses her own clothes and Jacob only wears basically one type of stuff anyway. So, I don't really have that division. The stuff they wear to school is the same stuff they wear at home. It gets dirty, I wash it, BFD.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I agree with bopeepsheep on the usage of "everyday" to mean "ordinary". And yes, being a time-poor professional with a spouse who never got the hang of housework, as far as I was concerned, letting the kids get messier than they could at home was one of the main points of nursery!

[ailbhe]

Perhaps drop-in and part-time creches have different rules. (That, or my standards are low, low, low...)

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

We don't have separate clothes, apart from now that Kate has a uniform since starting reception. She gets it filthy every day & I need to do an ariel wash every weekend to get them clean.

Holly comes back from pre-school far cleaner than after an afternoon with me at home ...

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

I, too, think of "everyday" clothes as the non-special ones, and because of that, I would have assumed that the child was wearing much nicer clothes at school, and needed some slobbier clothes for after school/weekends. That's how it worked for me growing up because I went to a Catholic school with uniforms, but it does seem strange if it's a young kid at a nursery.

[buzzy-bee.livejournal.com]

I'm unusual it seems, because L definitely has nursery clothes and weekend clothes. I still do like dressing him in cute clothes at weekends, but during the week he wears <£2 t-shirts and jeans/joggers bought at the supermarket, because he comes home covered in paint at least 3 days a week.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was guessing that the other poster was one of those mums who completely ignores the handout asking people to send their kids to school / nursery / kindergarten in clothes that the kid won't be reluctant to fingerpaint in, because she thinks 'school' requires cute co-ordinated outfits with skirts.