The Perfect Hat

Hats. Caps. Lids. Headwear. Headpieces. Headtoppers. Chimneytops. Toupee-covers. Brainwarmers. Baldspot-air-protectors. Skull-suckers. Pate-cozies. Crown-doilies. Whatever you’d like to call them, hats have historically proven themselves rather useful, fruitful, suitable, and otherwise tasteful in aspects of personal fashion. And of course, they are everywhere.

Or so one would think.

My daughter’s hats drive me nuts. Some are too big, and, thusly, useless until her head balloons into its next stage. Others are weather-specific, which only makes them helpful when Nature’s capriciousness is what was planned on when leaving the homestead. The rest of them (the hats, I mean) are purely, and idiotically, “functional.” They have a bill that goes all the way around the head (like a bucket hat, for example, or a so-called sunhat), which serves to protect the inserted head from sun and/or rain. These aspects are wonderfully advantageous should the particular hat-wearing child be seated or, God forbid, standing in the sun or the rain. But put that same circumambular-rimmed thing atop a child in a chest-born carrier or even in your common, everyday, mundane, average, push ‘em-pull ’em stroller, and then that stupid thing (i.e. “hat”) turns and pivots and swivels around their head and it covers their face and it’s handy chinstrap gets in their mouth and soon enough the kid’s irritated and the kid’s annoyed and you’re cursing and the kid’s screaming and the kid’s inconsolable and consequently things go rapidly downhill from there. All because of that stupid little hat.

So…I needed a new kind of hat.

So, naturally, I went on the hunt.

What I needed was a sort of Wild West bonnet, only without all the Little House on the Prairie/Laura Ingalls Wilder frontiersman themes about it (in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the Recent Paterfamilias is personally related to the aforementioned and afore-denigrated Ms. Wilder).

It took an extensive search and multiple frustrating ordering mishaps and administrative delays, but ultimately, finally, through no fault of their own, I discovered Urban Baby Bonnets. Colorful, reversible, non-combustible, wonderful. They cover her (the baby’s) face from the sun. They don’t pivot around her (the baby’s) head. They compliment her (the baby’s) feminine wardrobe. And they don’t drive her (the baby’s) father (the Recent Paterfamilias) to mind-bending distraction.

One would think that this sort of headgear wouldn’t be so difficult to come by. But in all of the stores, sitting there smugly on their tidy little shelves, there they are, nothing but sunhats and bucket hats and baseball caps. And that’s all there is. As if there’s nothing else out there. As if all the hats in the world were represented on that tidy little shelf. It’s almost enough to nearly make a person start to think that International Child Hat Producers (those devious shortsighted miscreants) might actually have a personal vendetta against the mental welfare of well-meaning headwear sensitive parents.

Admittedly, I am sure that there must be another reason why any rational person might ever suggest that putting an infant in a bucket hat is a, not only good, not only beneficial, but an essential, even brilliant, idea. But whatever that reason is, I have yet to find it. These stupid hats. It’s almost enough to make a person want to chuck them all out the window and go out on the street and walk around with a parasol (but then again, strolling about with a Sunlight Umbrella might make you look like one of those “Silly People” I’ve been reading so much about as of late).