The Monster this morning put up a massive fight about attire.

Now, personally, I don’t generally care what he wears as long as it’s seasonally appropriate and clean.  He wants to go to camp in the same shirt for two days – if it’s not dirty, why not.

Fridays, however, his camp wants him wearing his camp shirt.  (This isn’t that unusual – my camp was the same way.)

I don’t really recall him ever having some massive fight about a particular piece of clothing before, but he absolutely, positively did not want to wear the green Camp Milldale shirt this morning when the wife presented it to him.  No.  No, No, No, No.  Screaming, yelling, flailing arms and legs.

It wasn’t about the tag in the shirt – he’d not even gotten that far yet at the point where he was fighting about it.  It wasn’t the color – he has other green shirts.  (Okay, this one was brighter than those.)  If anything, it was because the shirt was a new shirt and he’s not seen it before…

Which raises a new set of problems for us – he’s getting bigger, obviously.  He’s growing like a normal, healthy five year old does.  He’s not really ever before put up significant fights about clothing, and even adapted without much of a fuss to the school uniforms he had to wear all year, which is what makes this morning’s fight all the more troubling.  We can’t be in a position for both of us to be required to get him dressed on a given day because he doesn’t want to wear something.

We did, in the end, get him into the shirt, get him sun-screened and off to the bus without him getting out of the shirt.  And he’s not yet figured out that if he messes up his shirt, he’s liable to be changed into something else that’s more to his liking.  I’m just hoping that this is a phase again, and not something new that we have to be concerned with going forward.