Whose Shoes Are Whose?

Before you judge me, before you lambast me for being wasteful, a killer of the environment, someone with a pathetic and harmful fetish that has now been passed on to my innocent children, let me mention that a huge percentage of the shoes you see here were accumulated secondhandly—either hand-me-downs from friends or purchased on ebay or through our local mother’s club.  In fact, if any of my mom friends are reading this, you may see some of your daugthters’ old shoes in this ginormous mess.  So there.  I’ve sufficiently defended my gluttony.  (Oh, and we will be donating shoes when we’re all done with them, so, again, another “green” point to add to my tally.)

But I guess that that caveat still doesn’t make up for the fact that this is a pile, a PILE of shoes in the middle of the big girls’ bedroom.  It’s a PILE that is waiting to be sorted because all three girls are changing shoe sizes—yet again.  (Well, to be honest, Evie doesn’t even wear shoes yet, but she will by this winter, so we’re pulling those suckers out from storage too.  Thank god we’re done having kids and can start moving stuff out instead of up into the attic!)

I spent last weekend moving clothes all over the place.  Summer clothes:  out.  Winter clothes:  in.  And then, of course, the temperature is back in the 90’s this week.  Go figure.  But the closets are all set now.

And now it’s time for me to tackle the shoes.

Yes, I’m a lover of shoes and had at least 50 or 60 pair to my name at one point, but being a mom of three daughters doesn’t always leave me much money to spend on my own fascination with them.  Plus, given that I’m home with the girls the majority of the time and am allowed out of the house only once per week (exaggeration—you knew that, right?  Please tell me you knew that because some days I forget myself since it feels like we’re trapped here most of the time.) do I really need a whole passel of shoes for myself?  I need sensible, workaday shoes—some for summer, some for winter—a few for nicer events like church or dinners out, and that’s about it.   And it seems like I spend the majority of my days in flip-flops or slip-on athletic-type shoes anyway, so I have learned to cut back, buy only hard-working, well-made shoes in lieu of having a PILE of them.

But, you have to keep something in mind when you are clucking your tongue and shaking your head back and forth as you look at this PILE of shoes:  There are three girls in this house, and they ALL will go through many, many sizes in a VERY short period of time.  Sadie, for instance, currently wears a size 11 or 12…and she’s only four-and-a-half.  Um, so do you see where I’m headed with this?  That means that she has passed through 11 sizes of shoes in under five years, and each of those sizes requires—like her mother—that she have a few for summer, a few for winter, some grubby ones for school, some nice ones for Sunday School, etc.  And times that by three.

Complicating matters even further, I must add, is that the girls all have very different feet types.

Sadie has a long, ridiculously narrow foot with a high arch and this big toe—have I mentioned her big toe before?—that is at least twice as long as the rest of her toes.  What that means is that her big toe is the dictator of what her shoe size will be even though all those other little toes, if they were on their own, should be, say, two sizes smaller.  And this big toe is one of the many features she has gotten from her father.  It sort of curves up too, kind of elfin in nature, and it’s really, really long.  Did I mention that?

Abbie, on the other hand, has square feet.  They are literally square, I kid you not.  I used to wonder about all those mothers who were, like, My kid has to have super-duper-extra-über wide shoes! because I thought it was just some parental idiosyncracy with giving the kid lots of space for his toes to wiggle around in.  But, no, it’s because the foot is so chubby that it needs that super-duper-extra-über width to accommodate the squareness.  And all of Abbie’s toes—bless her heart—are the same size, all the way across.  It’s like someone took all that extra toe-length that should have been there and chopped it off and handed it to Sadie’s big toe.  That is one bossy, demanding big toe, I tell you.

So, not only do we have to buy new shoes for every shoe size and every season, but we also have to buy DIFFERENT shoes—a whole new supply of them—for each of the two older girls because of their feet shapes.

So, if Evie’s feet don’t end up being either long and narrow with an ambitiously long big toe OR if they don’t end up being short, stubby and Sponge-Bobishly square, then, well, Evie will just have to go barefoot.  Just don’t call CPS on me.

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