The Key...

After years of nearly losing my mind shoe shopping, I finally found the key. We must go as a family and we must have a lovely lunch first--with a glass of wine. It makes the shoe shopping struggle so much less dramatic, and it probably saved a clerk at a store that is not StrideRite's life.

 

We started at StrideRite to find tennis shoes and hopefully wedding shoes for both kiddos. We found Evan some super cute little black dress shoes, and then he fell in love with these bad boys:

 Yep...that's Spider Man on his feet. Yep...he had them less than 24 hours before he got mud on the toe. Sigh.

This is what the shoes look like in action:

 Yep...the eyes light up. Does life get any better?

Issa, poor Issa, tried on four different pairs of tennis shoes trying to find a pair that both fit and met her fashion needs. We finally landed on these:

 We will not have to worry about losing them in the dark. That pink is blinding.

The selling point:

That tiny lightning bolt on the side. That Grace, a character in her new favorite book series, Junie B. Jones, runs super fast because she has lightning bolts on her shoes. Clearly.

We then went on a quest for white shoes for the wedding. Oh the humanity. Since our favorite clerk couldn't help us, we headed to a very nice store nearby. I refuse to say where because I have nothing nice to say--at all--and I'm choosing to take the high road. We walked in, and I explained to the clerk that we needed white shoes for a wedding in this size, preferably one of these pairs. She then announced she needed to size Issa's feet because I probably was asking for the wrong size. I should have walked out then. But, I took a deep breath, and I was in fact asking for the right size. She brought me several shoes in black, and informed me that now was the time to transition to black shoes. At least I now know what shoes fit, and I explained, again, that I needed them for a wedding and black shoes would not work. She then called me over to the computer to prove to me that they couldn't even order white shoes because, "Now is the time to switch to black." Needless to say, I didn't even respond. It was better for everyone. We looked everywhere and finally came home and ordered a pair online, because apparently you can in fact get white shoes in October.

And that is the saga of the shoes...