Shoe Shopping

Shoe shopping happens once a year here in our household.  It starts by pulling out all the kid shoes in the house and seeing who fits into what now, tossing those with holes and figuring out what each kid needs.  I take the girls to Famous Footwear and I need a drink about halfway through.  Maybe, Famous Footwear should start offering wine “tastings” along with their back-to-school sale??  It’d most likely end up in more money!  We start by each kid getting their feet measured.  Hey, don’t wear the name tag that says you’re a shoe fitting expert if you don’t want to actually measure feet!  Just saying.  Then each child proceeds to run/walk/crawl through what they believe to be their section of shoes, pulling out shoes that draw their attention, trying them on and then moving on to the next shoe.  As you can imagine this does result in quite a disaster….which I do try to mitigate and clean up but hey, maybe that wine tasting would be helpful for the shoe fitting “experts” as well.  I then try to corral one child and focus them on what kind of shoe they need in the price range I deem acceptable.  Lavender was fairly easy.  She needed tennis shoes and Scarlett quite happily found shoes with a “10” on the box, put them on Lavender’s feet and she refused to take them off.  Sold! Scarlett tried on a few pairs but she’s in that odd size of between toddler but a little too small for kids.  Nonetheless, she found every unacceptable shoe to try on (i.e. those with heels, seriously!) before I narrowed her to finding some dress shoes.  Until she found the cowboy boots in the boys clearance section.  Please, no one tell her they were in the boys section!  I was then informed that she was not taking them off her feet until I promised to buy them for her.  And she was damn cute but cowboy boots as your dress shoes in Spain?  argh!  I actually called Jeff to ask if I was crazy to let her pick cowboy boots.  He said she was expressing her individuality.  Then I moved on to helping October.  Did I mention the pitfall of her having too many choices?  The pair she really wanted wasn’t in her size and were in the “clearance” section (and if by clearance you mean $3 off, then yes, it was the clearance section!).  The dressy flats all had one issue or another so she moved onto dress boots.  She had a pair of brown Ugg’s, suede black, black leather with buckles, zippers AND ties, and one other similar suede black pair with a heel.  October melted down on how she liked them ALL and how could she decide.  She kinda liked this one, but she liked this one as well, OH!  Commence the rolling on the floor and shaking of the head over the decisions to be made.  She’s 8.  I intervened and said no to the Ugg’s and the pair with ties, buckles and zippers — we’d never leave the house!  She finally picked a very nice pair with an “excellent, rounded toe” as she explained.  October also needed tennis shoes and since I had just again learned my lesson of offering her too many choices, I picked three pairs that I thought wouldn’t make us look like obnoxious Americans (have you seen kids shoe styles recently??), that were the right price and a durable brand.  She chose a very nice blue pair of New Balance shoes.  No lights, no neon yellow, no studded sparkles.  I tried to explain to Jeff how shoe shopping goes with our three kids….he may just need to watch the surveillance videos.

Scarlett – cowboy boots

October

October

Yeah – she got lights and studded sparkles.

The complete cowgirl outfit!