Abigail is a shoe-lover. Any time she spots a shoe, adult or baby, she wants to hold it and smell it and bite it and shake it. I cringe whenever she gets ahold of a particularly ripe shoe of mine– it feels almost cruel to allow my unsullied baby girl such close proximity to years of ingrained foot odor, though she doesn’t seem to mind. It’s not that I have particularly stinky feet so much as I keep my shoes forever. I keep the worst ones in hiding where she can’t gain access but there is always a stray shoe lying around somewhere.

What Abigail hasn’t shown interest in, up until recently, is actually wearing shoes. Whenever I put her in cute girly shoes for church, she generally has pried them off by the time we arrive. But change is in the wind. As part of the girls’ weekend we took her shoe-shopping. She needed some sturdy, safe shoes to wear on her first camping trip. Grammy scanned the aisles for appropriate footwear, I struggled to fit Abi’s fat foot and curled toes into pair after pair tennies and mary janes, and then Auntie Shannon held her hands so she could walk around in them a bit and see how they felt. Abi loved clomping around in those shoes! She felt great! She would lift up one foot and then the other in the shoe store mirror to examine them. We came away with two pairs: some velcro tennis shoes, and some metallic pink moccasin-like shoes that were on clearance, not the cutest ever, but sensible and costing less than a fast food meal. A good back-up pair.

Today I pulled out the shiny pink ones for a trip to the library. I’m hoping to get her used to wearing shoes before we go on the trip so that she feels okay walking in them. As soon as I put them down, Abi grinned gleefully and carefully lifted her foot, pointed her toe, and aimed it at the shoe to try to put it on. I got her strapped in to the right shoe and she did the same balancing act with the left. Once both shoes were on, she wanted to immediately tour the house walking, with me holding her hands. She loved those shoes! One of them fell off (they fit better with socks) and she brought it to me to be put back on. She just couldn’t get over her own magnificent feet.

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