Shop til you drop...

Yesterday I did something very brave... I went shopping. That may sound ridiculous, but when you have a 5 month old daughter, shopping turns from a nice past-time on a Saturday afternoon to a manic juggling act involving going up and down in lifts, races across town to find the nearest feeding room, planning your route across town so that you achieve what you need to do in the quickest possible time, and buying clothes without trying them on because changing rooms are not designed to accommodate prams... in a nutshell... NIGHTMARE!

However, yesterdays trip was a complete success.... all thanks to my Mum and Aunt who took Ava off my hands for an hour and a half, enabling me to spend my christmas money with leisure (I spent over an hour of that time in H and M alone) and I've bought myself some lovely new clothes. I'm admitting this because I find it hard to do. I seem to have some weird abnormal gene which makes me unlike pretty much every girl on the planet when I say I hate clothes shopping. Somewhere in my past, I have developed this guilt complex which makes me feel guilty buying any item of clothing for myself. Ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, being frugal is great, I think its right to think through what you buy and we in the west often go way overboard with decking ourselves out in the latest fashions when many in the world would be grateful for a simple jumper to keep them warm. However, my guilt complex has led me to wearing a combination of clothes with holes in, hand-me-downs from my sister/friends/mum and clothes which I have owned for coming up a decade... it was time to invest in some basic non-holey items of clothing...

Last week, I sorted through my clothes and bagged up everything I never wear/had holes in/was too big/small for me and sent them off to the charity shop/recycling. I'm not joking when I say my wardrobe was literally cut down by about 3/4s. I was left with one pair of jeans (my other four pairs all had huge rips in them or bits of denim hanging off the back) so they were top of my agenda today. I also realised I needed some "basic" tops... you know, the standard black/white/grey/navy long-sleeved tees that you can wear under everything and are timeless.

I came home today armed with...
- black, white, grey basic tees
- nice long-sleeved pink/grey top
- stripy jumper
- pair of NON-HOLEY jeans

I feel like a new woman!!!!

So, I've had to overcome my guilt complex and spend a little bit of money so that I am no longer walking around in clothes that should've been chucked 5 years ago... meanwhile, they're all being recycled, so I don't even need to feel bad about that!