name brand envy

there are two types of people on middle school: those with spiffy and cool, brand name jeans...and those poor, pathetic losers who did not have spiffy, cool, brand name jeans. i, unfortunately was in the second group and i knew it. but i had friends...lots of friends, maybe even all of my friends, were in the first group. they sported brands like bongo and guess and the limited, and oh how i envied them. i wondered how i might get just one pair of jeans with one of those names on the back...play really hard in my jeans and get them all dirty and stained-surely then i could easily convince my parents to buy me a new pair. after all, dirty jeans on a 13 year old reflect not so much on that girl as the girl's parents. good plan, right? not so much... but there was a valuable lesson my parents were trying to teach me in all of this...something about how trivial the brand of my jeans were. at the end of the day, it didn't really matter all that much what kind of jeans i was wearing, i should just be thankful that i had some to wear. while i understand that now looking back, i didn't really get it when i was a preteen. obviously, my parents were the only ones who thought it didn't matter because all of my friends had cool jeans! even so, somehow i managed to survive middle school with no name brand jeans, and i'm pretty sure i don't have any lasting scars. but, unfortunately, i am facing a new dilemma as a mommy. for, you see, there are two types of parents now....ones who have sweet, awesome brand name products for their kids, and all the rest of those terrible parents who don't...