Episode 3

I took  the baby shoe shopping today. I made him sit in the stroller the whole time while I tried on shoes.  I showed him the shoes as I tried them on; explained the difference between slingbacks and mules and other pertinent information.  He was quite patient and he loved the turquoise sandals with the rhinestone buckle.  I know he did.  He smiled at them.

At one point while I was pregnant I couldn’t fit into any of my shoes any longer.  I was actually wearing my husband’s flip-flops.  And then I heard the horror stories… about women who could never again fit into the same size shoes they wore before they were pregnant.  I was crushed.  I couldn’t imagine… after all the time I spent patiently building up my shoe collection, to have it brutally ripped from me and to have to start all over again… it was almost too much.  Thankfully my feet did shrink, but I did miss a whole season of footwear.  Well, you can understand the shopping spree was really a celebration; probably beneficial for the baby to witness.

But the baby did have to sit in the stroller for quite a long time, just hanging out.  He had a set of plastic keys to play with and would doze off occasionally when he wasn’t helping me evaluate shoes.  Still, someone asked if I thought he felt lonely when he was in his stroller, and I had a sudden horrified vision of my son, years from now, in therapy because he had always felt abandoned and unloved.  His place at the center of my universe usurped because of a pair of strappy sandals at 30% off.

They were really cute sandals though. 

Bad mommy, baa-aad.