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Shoe lessons

I went shoe shopping with Eleanor yesterday. We had tried to go Saturday, but the wait would have been over an hour! Shoe shopping is hard enough, without trying to amuse 3 kids in a small store with tons of other kids misbehaving and crying and... Yesterday we waited 10 minutes.

Eleanor has a problem with latching onto one pair of shoes and not letting go. She also has the problem of feet that are just on the cusp of the younger youth shoes (size 8-1) and older youth (size 1-3). The last problem is that she does not yet know how to tie her shoes (she's working on it, but it's not going very well =(. Combining these problems makes shoe shopping potentially unpleasant.

Eleanor chose a pair of white shoes with a sort of quilted sides and lights. They were very nice, but they only went up to size 1. Eleanor is size 1.5. She wasn't really willing to pick out a new shoe, and the one she did pick wasn't available in her size. There weren't very many velcro shoes in her size. I asked the saleslady to pick out any velcro shoes in size 1.5. There was one pair, so if Eleanor didn't like them, we'd be in trouble. At first she rejected them, claiming that the other shoes would fit fine.

I asked her to change her attitude and the saleswoman pointed out that these shoes ("Nikelodeon Slimers") glowed in the dark. That gave her something to latch onto, and she eventually got excited about the new shoes. Disaster was averted, everyone was happy, and we were able to leave with a new pair of shoes. I hope that Eleanor has learned about making do with what she has: if not, she at least got some practice.
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