Patches

I love Cat Stevens - I used to have his Greatest Hits CD, but it, and all my others, got stolen several years ago. Why not download him onto my iPod, you ask? Um, because I don't have an iPod yet. I know; I'm so out of it. I think almost every single person I know owns an iPod, but when it comes down to it, my choices are usually, "Do I get my kids a Christmas present from Santa, or do I buy myself an iPod?" And you know what the answer to that question is.

Anyways, one of his songs, "Oh Very Young," reminds me of what I'm writing today's post on:

And though your dreams may toss and turn you now

They will vanish away like your daddy's best jeans

Denim Blue fading up to the sky

And though you want them to last forever

You know they never will

You know they never will

And the patches make the goodbye harder still

So, poor Dylan has been running around with holes in all of his knees. He's just really hard on the knees of his pants. He's always kneeling (like his daddy). Those two, instead of sitting cross-legged on the floor, always kneel. I think it's so weird. I hate kneeling. It kills me. We had a kneeboard when we were teenagers, and I tried it a few times, but I couldn't stand it, because it required kneeling for longer than, like, 30 seconds. None of us really loved the kneeboard, and when my cousin, Ryan, got his face cut open on it, we tossed it. Waterskiing is better, anyways.

I digress. Dylan is hard on his knees. I decided one Sunday to patch them, plus Ben's nasty jeans, but I only got as far as patching the holes on each corner of Ben's back pockets before I got really sick of it:

I had decided that, as far as corners of a pocket are concerned, I should just put the patches inside of the jeans. But now I'm wondering if that was the best choice. It doesn't look much better than his garmie bottoms peeking out of the holes. I don't know. I'm so bad at sewing. With the pocket corner patches, I was able to use my ne'er-do-well sewing machine, but I couldn't get it to work for the knees of Ben's pants, so I started hand-sewing a patch on them. Um, that lasted only one of the four sides. Then I looked at Dylan's, like, six pairs of jeans I needed to patch by hand, and I was like, no. Not gonna do this. It would take me a thousand years. Time is of the essence to me. I don't have time to do my hair and makeup every day. I hardly have time to shower! I don't have time to even trim my flippin' fingernails half the time. So do I have time to patch a million pairs of pants by hand? No. So I abruptly stopped Ben's knee patch.

Ben was convinced that he could use my sewing machine to do knee patches, and I was like, knock yourself out, dude. So this is what he did:

He just sewed back and forth, back and forth. It looks retarded. And he still wears them all the time. I'm so embarrassed.

And I was embarrassed about Dylan's jeans, but I was like, he's just going to have to suffer. The jeans are too small, anyways. So I figured that, as I slowly, pair by pair (only as I could afford it), bought jeans in his correct size, I could box his old, small jeans, pair by pair. Then I could fix them when Micah is five and ready to wear them. Maybe I would feel ready to fix them in five years. :)

Mom felt bad for me, so she took pity on me:

She has a really nice machine that isn't a brat about small, cramped, legs of pants. Here is Dylan, happily modeling a pair of patched pants:

Mom did a great job. I think it took her awhile, and I'm so grateful. And I'm tickled with the results. I should have handed over Ben's pair of jeans to have her fix, as well. (And I may still do that.)

Ben just loves those jeans so much that he doesn't want to get rid of them. (And he only has one other pair of jeans. Seriously.) It reminds me of a pair of jeans that I wore my first two years of college that my roommates and I named "The Fabled Ones":

Ignore my caterpillar eyebrows. Ew. Anyways, I loved those jeans so much that they faded and got thinner and thinner and started to get holes in the butt and the knees. So, instead of using plain denim patches, I thought it would be fun to put on colorful patches - hearts, flowers, butterflies, stars, etc. I know, I was weird. And a little bit of a hippie wannabe.

Here are some more shots of The Fabled Ones in action. This is me and my friend Matt. We, and a bunch of others, went up to Jackson for a day. You can see the patches on my right knee:

Lots of plaid involved in that picture. It was 1996, after all. Sing along with me: "Iiiiii, ohhhhhh, I'm still alive...yeahhhhhhh, Iiiiiii, ohhhhhhh, I'm still alive..." Hooray for Pearl Jam and for the grunge era.

My sis, Nat, also patched her jeans. Here we are, circa December, 1996:

My sophomore year, my roommates and I had a bunch of guy friends who we hung out with, and one of them was Cornelio. He was soooo teeny and skinny, and we bet that he could fit into my jeans (this was back when I was teeny and skinny, too), so he tried them on, and behold:

Hahaha!