Back-up shoes?

So it has come to this. In the whirlwind of the past few months our little boy Mebrahtom has gone from tentative first steps to thinking nothing is more hilarious than running away as fast as he can in the opposite direction from the one in which his mother or I am trying to herd him. He plays outside basically every day, and he actively wants to play outside every day, so over the course of these great-strides encompassing months he has gone from vaguely shoe-shaped baby foot coverings to legitimate (albeit still adorably miniaturized) shoes with stomp-resistant soles and everything. Of course Meb’s growing so fast, he’s bound to outgrow each pair of shoes before they wear out, so we know we’re in for purchasing multiple pairs over the course of the year, or possibly over the course of a season. But surely we can buy those shoes serially, one pair at a time, right?


Well, in theory, yes. (In theory, anything, because “in theory” is the most forgiving of qualifying openers.) But what this theory fails to take into account is a day in which I drive to the local VRE station to take the train all the way from hometown to work, while my wife on her day off takes Meb to visit some friends of ours who just had their second baby, and then around dinner time I take the Metro from work to a restaurant that happens to be right along the Orange Line, where other friends of ours are hosting a charity fund-raiser dinner, and my wife and son meet me there because the restaurant also happens to be in the same neighborhood as our friends with the new baby, and at the end of dinner I take Meb to the bathroom and change him out of his clothes (and shoes) and into pajamas and he and his mom and I get in the car in the parking garage and throw the stroller in the trunk and blindly toss my jacket and my work bag and my wife’s purse and the reusable shopping bag overflowing with Meb’s things (diapers and wipes and toys and books and sippy cups and the outfit he was wearing) in the back seat and drive back home and swing by the train station and pick up my car and drive both cars home, by which time the little guy has fallen asleep in his car seat, so I carry him up to his bedroom while my wife brings in everything heaped in the backseat footwells of the car and fortunately Meb stays asleep during the critical transition from carseat to crib but my wife and I are exhausted after juggling our dinners with trying to feed him and then chasing him around and keeping him from running into the restaurant kitchen so we pass out shortly thereafter. It also fails to take into account the following morning during which I get up and go to work like usual and my wife gets Meb up and ready for daycare as usual but can only find one of his shoes because the other one probably fell out of the hastily packed and just as hastily backseatward-flung reusable shopping bag and is most likely sitting in my car still, and with only one half of Meb’s only pair of real shoes in hand (and that effectively useless without its counterpart) my wife is forced to decide between the flimsy canvas slippers that have squeaky soles that BWEEP! with every step Meb takes, or heavy-duty rainboots. And man, on a morning like that, the thought that it sure would be nice to have a spare pair of everyday shoes for Meb to handle exact that kind of contingency sure does blow a big gaping hole in the theory that we only need one pair at a time for him, doesn’t it?

(Incidentally, my wife opted for the rain boots today. She and I think the bweeping shoes are hilarious, not to mention handy in that we can turn our back on Meb for a couple seconds and hear immediately if he decides to bolt for the stairs or something, but we didn’t want to inflict them on Meb’s daycare providers for an entire day; we strive not to be “those parents” who aggravate the daycare staff overly much.)