FashBlog.com

by Christina VanGinkel

We had an early dinner out this evening with two other couples. Our son accompanied us. Discussion at dinner quickly turned to our son's rapidly growing height, and overall size. From there, it led into how we keep him in clothes and shoes that are well fitting. Exactly one year ago, when he signed up for football, he weighed in with a weight of 155 pounds. Exactly one year later, he weighed in at 191 pounds. He is twelve years old.

His height has gone from 5 ft 2" to 5 ft 8". That works out to an average growth of one half inch a month. His shoe size has gone from a men's size eight, to a men's size 12. Unbelievably, he is far from being the largest child in his class, with one boy who happens to be ten days older, out sizing him by nearly a half a foot. I have the deepest sympathy for his parent's pocketbook!

As to my son, we have managed to keep him dressed in clothes that fit, through shopping locally and online for deals at every chance we get. We regularly check clearance racks at J C Penney's and Wal-Mart, and other local stores. We also frequently shop Overstock.com, Amazon.com, Ebay, OldNavy.com, and several other online outlets and storefronts. By book marking clothingstoreonline.com, we have quick access to all the clothing stores online that we could ever want or need.

I rarely pay full price for anything other than his shoes. As he is so active and needs several different pair at any given time, such as day-to-day shoes, boots for hunting, racing boots for when he rides his KX100, snowboard boots, etc., I can rarely seem to find the style of shoe or boot in the size he needs, when he needs them. Because of this, I usually do pay full price for his footwear.

The rest of his clothes though have been relatively inexpensive, thanks to the Internet. Last year alone, I conducted an experiment in regards to the savings I incurred by shopping online. It was not terribly accurate, as I had no comparison in price for some items, but when I did, I kept track of it. For example, he needed a pair of snowboarding gloves and a new pair of pants for boarding. We did shop locally to start. With prices in hand, we then shopped online. Our savings for these two items alone was a total of $35.00. By the end of the year, we had saved a total of nearly five hundred dollars, this just on clothing, and a few items such as one computer game and a few DVDs that we knew what the price locally would have been.

Often though, we would find such excellent deals on clothes for his rapidly growing size, we would just purchase them online without comparison-shopping locally. We also shopped at several online stores that we have no local version of to go into to conduct any type of pricing comparison.

Thanks to the Internet, we managed to keep up on his clothing needs without heading to the poorhouse!