Oh no! Shoes again!
Shoes are truly my cross to bear, to be specific I am talking about children's shoes. Every year, several time a year I might add, I struggle to get my girls a good pair of shoes for the winter. It usually ends up in despair as I never find the right shoes to withstand a boisterous play, bad weather and general mucking about.
This year I have taken more aggressive action and gone directly to the shoe source. Interviewing Audrey Cooper, owner of the excellent children's shoes franchise Little Piggy's, and got solid advice on shoes. While I am not a first time buyer, we can all learn from the advice she gives in our article on Shopping for Children's Shoes.
For the more seasoned children's shoes shoppers we have put together a list of the new shoe lines from our most popular brands. Get a good overview on the choices you can find in our article on Shoes for this Winter.
If you have followed my blog you will know that I struggle with the simple task of shopping for children's shoes. Maybe I am to fussy? Maybe I am to PC about my shoe choices? You can see my blog post on the shoe shops' gender issues, There Are No Shoes. Or the post on the continuous struggle to find practical shoes for girls in Kids Shoes Are Still A Nightmare.
I have already bought the pink Superfit shoes mentioned in the article and I am extremely pleased with them. They put a severe dent in my shoe budget, but at least I don't have to buy any school shoes, thanks to the schools very practical requirements.
You would think that I finally have nothing to complain about? Well, with children's shoes there is always something. My problem this year is that while I found ONE pair of great shoes, I can't buy two pairs of the same colour. This is one of the pitfalls of having twins, and of course of parents with children in very similar ages.
Buying the same shoes for my girls would be asking for trouble. Just imagine it, a stressful morning where you keep finding the same shoe over and over again, thinking it is the other pair. You have no mental picture of where you might have seen the missing pair, as both look the same. You have two girls arguing about shoes, swearing the other one took hers, regardless of initial you have put inside the shoes to differentiate them. Oh no! The initial has been rubbed out and now you don't know who owns the shoe.
I was trying to explain this to the girl in the shop; I could see her eyes glazing over with no understanding. She must have been projecting her thoughts strongly, because I could clearly hear her say "How hard can it be to keep track of shoes?" Well, I know my limitations and if possible I want to avoid putting myself in situations where I become a screeching harpy because my kids misplace their shoes and we can't find the matching pairs as the school bus is about to arrive.
If I buy the same shoes, I can assure you that they will spend as much time in wellies as wearing those very expensive, practical and waterproof shoes. I just won't have the patience to look for the matching shoe. I speak of experience, because I only made that mistake once and it was a nightmare. With my girls I believe in the saying: "same same, but different".
So instead I have one girl bragging about her new fantastic shoes and the other feeling rejected because she didn't get a new pair yet. Well, not true rejection, and while I feel embarrassed that I can't treat them equally I just won't get her the same pair. We would all suffer the consequences, one morning or another.
