The great shoe fiasco

The Hubs & I were feeling invincible on Sunday morning. A lovely date night will do that to you~ give us a few hours to actually talk to each other at a restaurant & we think we’ve got a new lease on life.

And so we decided to take the girls shoe shopping. 

Our first warning sign should have been their behavior in church: a tidge on the rowdy side, seeing as how they led an all-children-in-the-crying-room dance party each time the music started up. All.mass.long.

But the Hubs & I, in our zen-like state, thought we could handle it. How bad could it be?

Ha.

Hahahahaha.

After wrangling our little dancers back into the car after church, we arrived at Stride Rite exactly at noon as they opened.

Perfect! We smiled at each other as we ushered the girls inside, marveling at the fact that 1. we were the first ones in line because 2. we were the only people in the store.

Bliss!

I produced socks out of my purse for each of the girls {smiling again because wow, we were all over this shoe shopping thing!} & they each were sized for new shoes.

When the nice clerk came back with a few boxes of shoes for Baby H to try on, the wheels fell off in a hurry.

Screaming. Red-faced, indignant screaming. I’m positive if she could have put together a sentence, it would have sounded something like, “Are you NUTS?! I don’t know you and you are NOT.TOUCHING.MY.FEET.”

Working together, the clerk & I managed to get the first pair onto Baby H’s feet. She screams her hatred, but it’s too late: we’ve figured out they fit and that she can stand well in them. Sold.

I pass off the howling Baby H to the Hubs & turn my attention to Little O, who has now taken at least 12 pairs of shoes off of the display racks & re-organized them around the store.

The clerk is looking less enthused at this point. And my zen-like state is fading fast.

Little O proceeds to try on three pairs of shoes, proclaiming each one “perfect, Mommy! I love them!” Imagine a lot of short sprints and hopping and twirling in front of the mirror to emphasize just how much she adores them.

Since she’s in love with all three pairs, I make the executive decision to go with the purple sparkles. Boom. Done. Time to roll out. We pay an arm & a leg for two tiny pairs of shoes and we’re all set.

 

As we gather up the girls & head out the door, the Hubs mentions that there’s a New Balance store next door that we could check out, since we both need new shoes for vacation as well.

“Sure,” I replied, hanging onto that last shred of zen-like calm. “Let’s check it out.”

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that what happened next was Crazytown of epic proportions. Little O brought me entire racks of running skirts. Baby H stuck stickers all over New Balance’s leather couch. Every shoe within grabbing distance was re-arranged. Raisins fell like rain everywhere. Their dolls Ariel & Belle were given new “homes” in sample shoes.

Needless to say…eventually we just had to pack up & get out of dodge.

 

We decided to stop for lunch, which made everyone happy.

So happy, in fact, that the Hubs & I decided to make just one more stop on our way back home~ this time at our town’s local shoe store.

It’s okay, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s true: we had totally lost our minds. Totally.

Turns out our local shoe store had shoes for everyone. We didn’t need to go through the Stride Rite/New Balance song & dance, because we could get shoes for ALL FOUR OF US in one spot in about a half hour.

Sure, we had to pick out the shoes ourselves because no one wanted to come too close to the Crazy. Sure, our kids knocked over every single display shoe they could get their hands on, and the Hubs & I picked them back up as fast as we could. And sure, we should have called it a day after Stride Rite, but pride kept pushing us forward until we finally ~ FINALLY!~ achieved success.

 

Shoes for all four of us. Everyone is happy, everyone loves wearing their new shoes. We’ll hopefully have them all broken in by vacay time.

All in all, a pretty big parenting fail for the Hubs & I. Really, we went down with the ship because we had decided we were getting shoes and by golly, shoes are what we were going to get.

But…check out Little O & Baby H’s faces as they “practiced” running, walking and “skipping” {still a work in progress} in their new kicks on Sunday night. 

I think it was worth it.

Counting My Kisses: Does shoe shopping go smoothly for anyone with small children? If it does, it must be a superpower~ one that I don’t have. But what I do have is a good sense of humor, and enough common sense to know that Sunday, the Hubs & I completely let the animals take over the zoo. At least they have cute new shoes to show for it, right?

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