If the yoga pants fit …

Overall overload.

I’m a chronic re-wearer. Once I find something that I feel good in, I wear it until it has holes in it and almost all of its original dye color is washed away. My whole family knows it. My siblings still tease me about my collegiate addiction to overalls. Those bibbed pants did serious yeoman’s work, over tee shirts, button-downs, sweaters; to class, parties, movies, dates. I honestly believed that you could dress them up, if you matched your socks to your shirt and blew your hair dry.

When I became a functioning member of the work force, my re-wearing tendencies cooled slightly. I intuited that, for a public relations professional, wearing the same sweater every day for three weeks would be frowned-upon. I guess I backslid on the weekends, relying on the same rotation of shirts and jeans, but I knew enough to twist the Rubik’s cube of my limited wardrobe at least once before every outing.

Here’s the thing: Now that I’m staying at home with the boy-o, the re-wearing censor is dead. Every day – unless they’re in the wash – I wear Lululemon yoga pants, a white J. Crew “perfect fit” tee shirt, and a Beyond Yoga wrap that my sister Anne gave me. Every day. I go to the Lexington Co-op in them. I show up at the library in them. I take Baby to Itsy Bitsy yoga at East Meets West in them. (Here, you might say, “Well, there you’re appropriately dressed, at least.” Not really. It’s yoga for the babies. The parents could wear snowsuits and still not break a sweat.) I even have multiples of one particular Bravado nursing bra that I rotate according to the laundry cycle. The only things that vary are my socks, and if I could find a perfect pair, I’d probably buy seven pairs and add them to my repertoire.

I’d been told that this could happen: That, once you stay home with a child, you rely more and more on what used to be work-out apparel. That you “try less” because your audience is usually limited to one small, fashion-indiscriminate person. And I suppose I knew that, with my history, I might find myself going back to the same comfortable clothes day in and day out. But what I didn’t expect was the total lack of self-consciousness I have about my uniform. Seriously, who cares? Does the cashier at Wegman’s mind that the last time I pushed my cart through the aisles I was wearing the same thing? Nope. Does the hipster chick who hollers out the orders at Spot Coffee even notice that the lady who ordered a decaf Americano had the same thing on yesterday? Uh-uh.

Because you know what they notice? The sweet-faced little blue-eyed baby with the long, long lashes who’s strapped on to the front of me. At 33 years of age, I have found the ultimate diversion from my re-wearing habit. Even my siblings, who can usually be counted on to taunt me for my fashion don’ts are oblivious, as long as I have my sonny boy in tow. It’s so liberating! So freeing! My fear that I’m being lazy with my appearance has evaporated. Poof! And just this one beautiful child is bound to buy me, oh, five years of yoga panted bliss. All I have to do now is figure out how long I have until this yoga wrap wears out and then make sure that I always have an infant until then.

Now that’s what I call family planning.