Day 29: Baby Shoe Hell

 I‘m taking part in a 30-day writing experiment. The theme for me is “personal, not pretty.” See Kale & Cigarettes for details and the Facebook Group to read stories by other 500-words-ers. 

I wish someone around here would offer a workshop on putting shoes on a baby. Kind of like a “mom and baby yoga class” but exclusively dedicated to the acrobatics involved with getting a shoe on a one-year old.

When I try to put shoes on my daughters, they perform this freakish trick where they roll their tiny little feet up into perfect circles so the shoe won’t fit, and no matter how hard I yank and plead and forcibly shove the foot down into the shoe, one second later, I turn around and the shoe is off the foot, in the mouth. 

I’ve been doing my usual 5 to 7 hours of light Googling a night to try to find a better baby shoe. I’ve also asked every single mom friend I have what they recommend. Most of them have recommended shoes that are indeed very cute (and maybe stay on?) but cost $60-75 a pair. That’s $150 for twin shoes that might fit, if I’m lucky, for 3 weeks.

The other option is to just never leave the house, which is pretty much how I handle this problem most of the time. But when I do have to leave, I have 3 choices:

1

Go with the super cute moccasins a friend gave the girls for their birthday. Spend the entire outing alternately feeling smug about how cute the moccasins are and having a panic attack because WHERE DID THAT MOCCASIN GO? We also have a sweet and weather-appropriate pair of boots their stepsister gave them. Same problem, but way harder to get on and there’s the risk they will clock each other in the head when they forcibly kick the heavy boot off.

2

Just socks. Walking around the park in socks. Walking around the coffee shop in socks. Sock-feet dangling out of the ergo, or the shopping cart. Freezing-cold feet in the Wasatch in the winter.

(My mom had a friend in the early 70s of my childhood—this tall, funky black man who never wore shoes. I mean never. Not in the winter, not while walking through deep snow to get into our house in a mountainous rural town, not in restaurants, not in stores, nope never. Eventually he had an affair with my belly-dancing aunt who lived next door and fell off the radar. My uncle divorced her and married a much more reasonable and down-to-earth woman named Lorna and they have two awesome kids whom I adore. This has nothing to do with this post.)

These snowsuits are super cute, super bourgie hippie (Patagonia), and super impractical in the sense that the girls hate them.

3

Stuff their entire bodies into their snowsuits so I don’t have to think about shoes. This is like, next-level in terms of getting them dressed to go out. They hate the snowsuits so much, and can’t walk in them, so once they’re in these grape-colored straightjackets, the only thing they can do is lie around in the ergo or sit immobilized in a snow bank, pleading for mercy with their terrified eyes.

Once, Jon and I tried to introduce the girls to the slide in the park whilst wearing their snowsuits. I have some great pictures and even one super cute video that make it seem like this was a fun idea. Honestly I’m worried they’re going to have to seek therapy for it later on.

Today, during my usual rabid and pointless internet baby-shoe rabbit hole, I printed out a baby-foot sizing chart so I now at least know roughly what size they take. That is step 1. Step 2 is going to be finding a reasonably priced, gender-neutral, actually usable shoe that a reasonable human wouldn’t feel guilty upon seeing the price.