April 27th, 2004

There has been a lot of talk revolving around conspiracy theories the last few days. Conspiracies involving the government and 9/11, conspiracies about new babies, conspiracies about the sky being blue. Well, I have recently discovered another conspiracy as a father, perhaps not quite as globally relevant, but a conspiracy none the less. This conspiracy involves a secret partnership, much like the rumored bond between big oil conglomerates and car companies. This relationship however is at a more personal and tauntingly conspicuous level – especially for guys like me, recently indoctrinated into the world of fatherhood. It involves baby clothes and whatever corporations out there that are involved in snap production.

Baby clothes utilize incredibly miniscule amounts of fabric to create cute little outfits for newborn babies to wear. Conversely however, these tiny fragments of clothing are loaded with snaps – more snaps per square unit of clothing than any other garment on the market – several times over. If adults wore clothes with a similar ratio of snaps to fabric, gravity would render us unable to take more than a few arduous steps. What makes this overuse of snaps more frustrating is the fact that these snaps are so diminutive that they take large daddy fingers painstaking minutes to close each individual snap – more often than not while a writhing infant kicks and fusses over the new layer of clothing being strapped onto their gentle frame. After wasting what seems like hours of my life struggling with endless lines of snaps I have concluded that a secret pact must exist between these two entities – the baby clothing industry and the snap manufacturers. There is simply no other way to explain this gratuitous usage of snaps. I imagine that there must be mob connections involved or something of the like – and this mob must definitely be comprised of either women with dainty fingers, or childless men, either way they obviously stand unsympathetic to the plight of the new father.