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aliki
I went to pick up Erika at her new daycare today, and all the children had taken off their shoes and left them in the shoe bin by the door, as they had been playing outdoors and the shoes were muddy. Shoeless Erika comes running up to me, excited to leave, holding her lunchbox, Puppy, and running for her jacket. There are two shoebins by the door with an assortment of jumbled shoes tossed in there; I reach in and grab her purple-gray sneakers.
Erika says "ouch! They hurt! You put them on the wrong foot!" I check and the left shoe is on the left foot. Then I notice an identical pair in the other bin, but it looks just a tad too big. I check the sizes-- one pair is a size 11 and the other pair is a size 9-- and in this moment, kneeling by the shoebin, I can't remember what size Erika wears. Both seem like plausible options but I'm immediately transported into a Goldilocks scenario: Erika is complaining that the size 9s are too small, and the size 11s look still a little too roomy for being shoes that are over a month old.
I ask her to wiggle her toes, take them back off to adjust her socks, check the heel of her foot to make sure it went in properly, sizing the shoe up next to her foot to see which one fits better; but I have no answer! The bottom line is: (a) the shoes she went to school in have reproduced asexually, and (b) now neither one fits as a result of this cloning.
I resort to asking her daycare teachers, and they indicate that the size 9 was in the "3-year old bin" (Erika's class) while the size 11 came from the "4-year old bin", so the smaller one is Erika's. So I throw them on her despite her squawking that the shoes don't fit, and we head out the door. We're halfway to the parking lot when the teacher comes flying out the front door, gesturing for us to return. We walk back (well, really Erika half-hobbles back, like she was shot in the left thigh), and the teacher's holding up a different pair of purple-gray sneakers, which I instantly recognize as Erika's. It's one of those things where, initially looking at only the one option of two identical pairs, they looked like her shoes but clearly were not, but I couldn't put my finger on it; but upon seeing her actual shoes, it's an "ah hah! That's it!" moment. Hard to explain.
See photo evidence above. There were TWO pairs of Oshkosh B'gosh "Dart G" shoes (belonging to a pair of sisters, Laila and Sophia), and one pair of Oshkosh B'gosh "Orbit" shoes (Erika's!). And apparently Erika (or someone else in the school, though it'd be weird to think it was another child) took to hiding her shoes in a different room, all by its lonesome self, by the coat hangers. And gosh darnit, when I checked the sizes, I had even mentally noted "Oh yeah-- they are Oshkosh shoes-- which is Erika's... why isn't either shoe fitting??!?" and convinced myself if it's the right shoe brand and the right style of shoe and the right color, why is it not fitting?!?! When clearly, the "Dart-G" and "Orbit" look so different. Thanks, Oshkosh B'gosh for your clearly and vastly innovative selection of non-pink sparkly shoes for toddler girls. Erika's shoe size, by the way, is a size 10.
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Date: 2013-02-20 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 08:39 pm (UTC)I also don't label her clothes, because (a) she outgrows them in a few months, and (b) she has too many, and (c) she hates tags and I hate Sharpie markers (I don't deface my own books either-- I know some people highlight, underline and write in margins, but I just can't)...
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Date: 2013-02-20 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-20 09:22 pm (UTC)