I have just about had it with Lydia’s glove issues, and the winter has hardly begun. She must be the glove-losingest kid on the planet. I’m almost convinced she thinks they’re one-wear, disposable items! I try not to freak out too much about it, but those things are damned expensive, and it’s just way too cold to send her outdoors with no gloves (or even with cheap, thin ones). Last week, I bought her a new pair of thick, insulated gloves after she lost her old (and I use the term loosely) gloves on one or another fritids outing. After wearing them for two days, she showed me that she had an itchy red rash on her hands and wrists that could have come only from the gloves. I decided to wash them and see if that got rid of whatever caused the rash before I went and bought yet another pair of gloves.

When she got home from school today, I asked her if they had made her hands itch, and she said “no, but there’s another problem.” I sighed inwardly (okay, outwardly, too) and asked what was the problem. Apparently the boy whose cubbyhole is next to hers has the same gloves, and he saw a hole in his glove, said it wasn’t his, and took Lydia’s instead. In the first place, I know her glove didn’t have a hole in it because they were brand-new, and in the second place, hers smelled strongly of the fabric softener I used last night when I washed them. Now she has one that smells apple blossom fresh and one that just … doesn’t. Not to mention that the not-so-fresh glove left a rash on her hand, and the newly-washed one didn’t. All signs point to Casper having taken Lydia’s glove and leaving her his hole-y one. She says she’s too shy to ask for it back, so it looks like I’m going to have to send a note with her to school tomorrow to see if we can get the right glove back. I did sew up the hole in Casper’s glove, so that should count for something.