I have never seen a little kid who wasn't fascinated by a pair of shoes, adult shoes that is. When all my kids were little they would commandeer a pair of someone's shoes and go clumping about the house wearing them. One of MK's favorite things to do was to put on high heels and try valiantly to walk around in them.
These two kids are no exception.
Sunday Savannah couldn't resist her daddy's boots sitting in the kitchen beside the door. Nothing would do but to get herself into them and try to walk about with them on.
2 comments:
Ann, you are so right about kids and shoes. Here's a little shoe story I wrote in 2008 titled "A PAIR TO REMEMBER" (part one)
Early one morning, when my sons were very young, one of my boys bops into my bedroom just as I'm awakening. If you think the first thing out of his four-year old mouth was “Good morning, Mommy” you’d be so wrong. It was “Where do protons and neutrons come from?”
Protons and neutrons? I look him in the eye and plead, “Come on, tell me, how old are you really, in people years? And where did you come from?”
When I’m first waking up, I’m not thinking protons and neutrons. I’m too busy grouping around trying to find my shoes.
Time passes, my boys get older and they ask “Just what is it with women and shoes?" Taking the easy way out, I say, “Hey boys, let’s get back to those protons and neutrons.” I have to remind my sons that their attachment to shoes wasn’t always indifferent.
Jon, one of my foster sons, was three years old when he spotted a pair of red high heels in Kmart as we cut through the shoe department to get to the toy department. Those red high heels, right there at his eye level, stopped him dead in his tracks.
This is the same child, who not one, but two, psychiatrists diagnosed as having the worst case of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder they’d ever seen. And there he stood, totally, 100-percent focused on those red shoes. After that, anytime we went back to that store or any other that sold shoes, it became his mission to seek out red high heels and throw a temper tantrum because I wouldn’t buy them for him.
After too many reruns of this, I had a solution - buy Jon the damn shoes and get it over with. My husband immediately vetoed my plan. He felt that somewhere down the road it could adversely affect Jon's psyche. Jon is 23 years old now and to this day he still chases after red high heels, but now there’s always an attractive woman wearing them.
When Andy became part of our family at age two, he had never slept in a bed or worn a pair of shoes. We weren’t successful at weaning him from sleeping on the floor, but we did get him to wear shoes, but only sandals, so he could still see his wiggly little toes.
Douglas was in fifth grade before we slipped a pair of name brand sneakers on his rapidly growing feet. He must have been lusting after them for a while, because only Cinderella’s smile could have been larger than his was that day. When we got home, he placed his new Nikes in a prominent location and there he sat worshiping them. In his 10-yr old wisdom he declared, “Sometimes a pair of shoes is more than a pair of shoes.”
A PAIR TO REMEMBER (Part Two)
I was such a late bloomer as a teenager. Can you imagine being 16 years old and undressing in the PE locker room where all the other girls are sporting bras (or brassieres, as they were called back then) and there I stood in my undershirt. This was the 1950's, the era of Marilyn Monroe, when being voluptuous was the benchmark. You might say the bar, or bra, had been raised.
I hated milk, but while other teens drank Coke with their fries and burgers, I always drank milk. I thought it would help me grow boobs. The biggest insult of all was when I eventually got big enough for a bra, they were being burned, not worn.
Like most women, I think shoes can be sexy. It was a pair of low cut black flats that saved my 16-year old self-esteem. When I tucked my feet into that pair of low cut shoes, for the first time in my life, I had cleavage -- toe cleavage.
Saying that shoes can be sexy causes my husband to chime in giving me his male perspective which echoes my sons’ question about shoes. However, I don’t remember asking him for his male perspective and I’m starting to wonder where he was when we were talking protons and neutrons. To prove his point, he asks when was the last time I saw a good-looking woman walk into a bar and heard a guy say, “Wow, look at that pair of (pause) shoes!” Personally, when he sees a good looking women walk into a bar, or anywhere else, he says he doesn't even notice if she has feet.
With that he says he rests his case. I say the jury’s still out.
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