We went shopping today for new shoes for Corwin. He hadn’t worn his current shoes for months, preferring to wear sandals, even when he needed socks to keep his feet warm. It turns out that what he doesn’t like about his shoes is the time it takes to tie them. Instead, Corwin wanted to go back to velcro shoes. Mom thought he should stay with lace shoes but Corwin gave her the puppy look for a long time at the shoe store and it eventually wore her down. Corwin ended up with shoes that didn’t even have velcro but are the elastic slip on kind. I think Corwin liked them not only for that but for the shark motif of the shoe. It has a little dorsal fin in back plus two side flaps on the front that can be put up to look like a front fin. Plus the grip on the bottom looks like the teeth in a shark’s mouth. We figured that he wears other shoes for actual athletics (such as soccer) so he doesn’t need as firm a grip for this everyday shoes. Plus, he gave us the puppy look.
However, Corwin did like some of the other shoes and offered us an alternative resolution — buying all three pairs of shoes. I explained that wasn’t feasible and sometimes one had to make hard choices. I used the analogy of selecting cards for a Magic deck, an issue Corwin and I had discussed earlier that had concluded with Corwin explaining that sad fact of life to me. I think it sunk about as deep as my pep talk on the glories of abstract algebra that morning did.
P.S. While we were there Alice spent the time looking through all the shoes. She eventually picked out a pair of cute little purple dress shoes. Alice brought the shoes over to Mom and indicated her desire for them in a very insistent way. So Mom bought her the cute little purple dress shoes.
The shoe guy was impressed by the fact that Alice couldn’t say “Mama” or “Dada” yet but she could say “shoe” and know what it meant.