Kindergarten Girl Fall/Winter Dressing Tips 3

Once a mom told me: Buy velvet clothes. They don't get stains easily. It is so true.

Velvet dress-like top is one of my favorite for the season. It is warm, pretty and easy to clean. A few examples are:

(Gymboree - Candy Shoppe - 2008)

(Gymboree - Wild One- 2009)

(Gymboree - Candy Shoppe - 2008)

(Gymboree - Hedge Owl- 2011)

Living on a budget

You may ask: What if I'm living on a budget? Or you just don't want to spend so much on kids clothes. After all, many of them only last one season.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

A few days ago, I was looking for a few cooking pots on Target.com. Once I found the products, I need a filler to reach $50 to get my free shipping. Not surprisingly, I clicked on the clearance section. http://www.target.com/c/clearance/-/N-5q0ga

Last time I visited that section was many years ago. At that time the site just launched and of course there were few items on clearance. This time... WOW! I checked Kids/Girls. There are 458 items! It was overwhelming.

Deals are also sweet. I saw quite some items are 75% or more off. That means $2.48 for a short sleeve shirt. 30-50% off items are plenty. Moreover, the website will still apply other promotions such as free shipping, buy one get second one 50% off if the items are eligible.

I saw a swimsuite at $3.52 with BOGO promotion. If you buy 2, total is $5.28, that is only $2.64 each. I almost got 2 for my girls to have a sister look.

When you click through, you may see some are out of stock. Oh well, good deals go fast. So you will have to be patient to navigate through pages. But eventually your effort will be paid off.

Besides, the Target local stores also have clearance racks.

How to score old Gymboree items from ebay

Dresses in the following pictures were all my ebay scores.

Alice looked a bit sad in the last photo not because she didn't like the dress, but because we arrived too early and couldn't find the bunny to take her Easter photo with.

Oh, this beloved vest also came from ebay:

So how to score old Gymbo items from ebay?

First, you have to know what you're looking for. Thanks to a Gymbo devotee named Amy, you can find all the images and names from past Gymboree lines at this location. Spend some time to browse through the archive, and I'm sure you will identify more than a few have-to-have items.

Second, do the right search on ebay. The key words I usually used were "Gymboree + line name+ size+ nwt". Yes I only look at new-with-tag items. You never know what "EUC (excellent used condition)" or "like new" really means for a specific item.

Third, set your spending limit. For me, I'm willing to pay 15 dollars including shipping for a dress, maybe 20 if I really really want it.

And finally, be patient. Good items with reasonable asking prices aren't always available. So you have to check out ebay pretty often. If I really want something, I will check every other day to see if it's listed. You can sort items by "Time: newly listed" so that it takes only a few minutes for each search.

Now it's your turn to score big on ebay. Good luck!

Guilty pleasure

These days I've bought way too many things for Alice than I should. On my business trip to San Francisco this week, I got four toys, four pairs of tights and one dress for her. Nothing for myself and nothing for dear hubby.

Today, because Gymboree is giving out free shipping and because I have a 20% off coupon, I got the following items:

This is the typical way of how I spend my "fun" money, which amounts to about 100 dollars each week, toys and clothes and more toys and clothes.

Every time my hubby found out a new package sitting on our lounge, he would pick it up and look at me with that helpless and confused look. And I would always say, "That's on sale!" or "It's a great deal!", and I would also promise to throw out some old toys/clothes that Alice doesn't need anymore. Of course most of times I didn't keep my promises.

Cheap alternative

I really like this Crewcuts dress for its flouncy bubble hem. But of course I am not going to swallow the $69.50 price tag. Come on, does it really worth 70 bucks?

So when I was wandering in the children's section of H&M the other day and found this little dress for $12.95, you can imagine how happy I was.

 

The pink bow is a bit cheesy,  but that's easy to fix. It took me only 2 minutes to remove it with scissors. It also comes in two other colors, though none of them looks as good as the cherry one.

And if you want to know, no other H&M dresses worth buying, in my opinion.

Let it snow

Gymboree releases its new snowman theme line "Cozy Cutie" today. Oh my! Too cute!

Anyone has extra Gymbucks to share? Can I have some?

Dress vs. Jumper

A friend of mine asked me the other day what's the difference between a dress and a jumper. In my opinion, a dress is designed to be worn by itself and a jumper is supposed to be threw over something else. Here is how Wiki describes a jumper:

"A jumper (in American English), pinafore dress or pinafore (British English) is a sleeveless, collarless dress intended to be worn over a blouse, shirt or sweater. In British English, the term jumper describes a sweater. Also, in more formal British usage, a distinction is made between a pinafore dress and a pinafore; which, though a related garment, has an open back and is worn as an apron."

Thus, by definition, this is a jumper.

 And this is a dress for having short sleeves.

So the real distinction is that, a dress might look a bit bulky on top of a shirt, whereas a jumper, being sleeveless and collarless, looks just perfect over a long sleeve shirt.

But as I said before, anything you throw on a little girl looks good on her, plus we don't want our little ones to catch a cold during winter, right? So go ahead, let your girl pick her favorite dress and wear it over her favorite white shirt.