Fanny Packs and other fantastic accessories

Chloe won this fanny pack at
Circus Circus in Vegas

 Dear Laura and Victoria,
     My apologies in advance for the following fashionably offensive post.
                                              Love,
                                                   Jennie

Form over function, or function over form? It's the great query at the foundation of design. When form is given more relevance than function in a shoe, the result is Versace stilettos. Function over form produced the Croc and Birkenstocks. The great architects and designers of the ages have found a balance that marries form and function in blissful symmetry, creating works like Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, which is both livable and pragmatic as well as visually eloquent and artistic.
     In my fancy life in the city, I grappled with the Form v. Function quandry daily, and it climaxed in a stylistic battle for my soul over a fanny pack. Fanny packs are incredible and I love them so much. It leaves my hands free, keeps the weight of my baggage in my hips instead of my damaged neck and shoulders, and makes for an easy grab when the iphone rings. I can buckle it on in the morning and forget about it. Such a prefect wonder of effortless functionality!
     I wore my fanny pack all the time, until my Versace wearing friends had a "serious intervention", at which point I pulled my big flashy leather purse out of the closet vowing to behave properly and with fashionable integrity henceforth. One afternoon several weeks after my surgery, I tentatively ventured to the Natural History Museum with my kids. My whole body still hurt, and my neck and back were a wreck. But, I wanted to look cool of course. So I ditched the fanny pack like a good city girl and lugged that dumb fancy purse to the Museum. Within about 5 minutes my back was a tangle of spasms and my shoulder had completely frozen, which caused my neck to clench and my jaw to lock itself into place. I had to walk back out to the car and ditch the purse, which left me with keys and water bottles and phones and so on crammed into the pockets of my skinny jeans. I actually shed some tears, not just of frustration, but of longing for that amazing fanny pack. I suffered all afternoon with keys poking my hip bones through the annoyingly skinny pockets because I allowed form to idiotically win over function.
     Never again, because now I live in the South where function wins every time. I haven't seen high heels for WEEKS! I used to start the day trying to find balance between looking great and not being uncomfortable, pretending that those jingly earrings and all the gold bangles tinkling from my wrist to my elbow weren't more annoying than boots full of bees. Now we use common sense. We think about what we're doing that day, and wear what works. "Mom, are we going to the movies in El Dorado, or riding the ATV's?"

Movies=yoga pants, cute hoodie, Toms, pony tale, fanny pack.

ATV riding=jeans, warm hoodie, tennis shoes, fanny pack.

Of course I still top it all off with lipgloss and my 2 karat wedding bling. I save a lot of money too because instead of paying for magazines like Lucky and Red Book to tell me what looks good, I don't care. And I think Brynna looks very cute on her new ATV with unprocessed hair and the Ducks sweatshirt that I had BANNED her from wearing in our former, less functional, fancy people life. Let's all be more functional.

She hunts too:)