Kid Shoe Shopping: How I Roll…

Shoe shopping with both boys: a necessity that ranks on the “fun scale” right up there with having a tooth pulled or going to the DMV. Jake no longer willingly sits in the stroller and is strong enough to will himself as straight as a board rendering all my attempts to get him into a stroller useless. He wants to walk. Promises to hold my hand. Ty doesn’t want to go. At all. I have usually broken a sweat before even attempting to make the journey from the car into the store…

Once in the store, it’s a lot of “please don’t touch that”, “no, not those shoes”, “how about THESE shoes”, “you’ll LOVE these shoes, just try them on”, “just sit for one minute”, “please let the lady measure your foot, just put one foot here”, “no, HERE”, “just one MINUTE”, “no, no, no…”

SO, one day it occurred to me to cut out the challenge. Save myself some trouble…

THIS, is how I now go shoe shopping with the boys. Gloriously, quietly, EFFICIENTLY alone…with their paper-cut-out equivalent. I trace their feet, cut them out, write the date on the back, and throw them in my wallet, in case I come across a steal of a deal or find myself with the chance to escape to the shoe store solo. The paper feet don’t complain. They don’t whine. They don’t tell me they want to go home. They sit, quietly. In my wallet.

And it saves me from having to play the “what size shoes does he wear, I can just return them” game.

A rare stroke of mommy genius that has been priceless in the make-things-easier category…