Turning the page of the newspaper today, I was rather tickled to see that the little girl in the BT advert was wearing a long sleeved t shirt that is stained with tomato sauce of some description. Very clever BT – you are making your advert so real.
My memories of my kids’ clothes from age 4 months to about 6 years, was the fecking stains. Let’s face it – their staple meals were: being weaned – carrot purée, daughter 1 organic carrots, daughter 2 bog standard carrots, daughters 3 and 4, HIPP baby jars of carrot purée. They then progressed to pasta. Aaaah pasta. Where would we be without pasta? But oh my the pasta sauce – what a bugger that was to get out at a 30 degree wash. We all know the adverts are bollocks: Persil, whiter than white? What a crock of shit. More like Persil at 30 degrees: ingrain the stain. I ingrained so many stains over the years, but still those clothes were handed down. Down they went: from daughter 1 to daughter 2, via daughter 3 to daughter 4 at which point I had reached denial about the stains and would offer the rejects to my sisters’ children. How often have you held up an item of clothing to the light, examining the stain and thought, sod it, it’s not that bad – that’ll do another rugrat.
Bibs took a lashing. I had those ones that each had a day of the week on them. Monday-Friday always lasted the longest, with Saturday and Sunday getting covered in the most crap. I would suggest that dad did more of the feeding at the weekend and took less care – but this could be untrue. It could be that during the week I fed the babies more natural products and by the weekend I had lost the will. Chicken nuggets anyone? Makes a change from carrot. Tomato ketchup on toweling is a challenge.
It has to be said that even now, really bad stains get sent to Granny to magically disappear. How does she do it? I guess it’s a skill of the over 70’s, because I can scrub the shit out of a tomato stain with every potion in the Betterware catalogue, but only Granny B seems to be able to get it out.
I’m not going to lie – the most stains I have to deal with these days are red wine. Red wine circles on the sofa, red wine circles on the coffee table, shed loads of red wine spilled on the cream shag pile rug on loan from my sister and have you ever tried to get a red wine stain off a long haired, white dog?
So I applaud you BT, for embracing and not shaming the stain. Stained clothes are an integral part of growing up and nothing to be ashamed of. The wine stains, however, are shameful.