Baby doesn’t need a new pair of shoes

Baby doesn’t need a new pair of shoes
David Trinko dtrinko@limanews.com - 12.20.2007

She’s only 4½ months old, so she hasn’t taken her first steps yet.
When she does, my daughter will have plenty of outgrown shoes she won’t be wearing.
Nineteen pairs of them, to be exact.
That’s a lot of shoes for a little girl who, until about two weeks ago, couldn’t even turn on her side alone. That’s a lot of protection for the footsies of someone who is constantly monitored throughout her days and nights. That’s a lot of untarnished rubber on sneakers that will never sneak.
And it’s a lot of wasted plastic too. A quick search on the Internet shows that baby shoes can cost up to $80 a pair.
My wife’s defense is we didn’t buy these shoes. They’re hand-me-down Robeez and Sketchers from both sides of the family. Often they were gifts to a child from someone who described the shoes with terms I reserve for the child: cute, adorable, sensible.
And they all look brand-spanking new. While someone may have worn them, no one ever had a chance to wear them out. After all, they’re baby shoes, in all their Size 1 glory.
I’m reminded of a Shania Twain song, “Shoes.” “Men are like shoes,” she repeats consistently. And while I’d generally disagree with the sentiment, it’s quite true for our baby. She doesn’t need men or shoes.
Perhaps I’m just not equipped to understand. I am, after all, just a man. While growing up, I had two kinds of shoes, “sneakers” and “church shoes.”
As I got older, we added a pair of “gym shoes” to the collection, at the urging of the school system. And typically every summer those gym shoes evolved into my “summer goofing off” shoes.
That rotation of three kinds of shoes stuck with me through college. When I graduated college, I renamed “church shoes” into “work shoes.” And “gym shoes” turned into “lawn-mowing shoes.” But they were basically the same thing.
It wasn’t until I got married that I learned I should have had two kinds of work shoes, now called “dress shoes,” in my repertoire. I don’t completely understand why, but now I wear black shoes with black or gray slacks and brown shoes for everything else. About that same time, I realized I was supposed to have belts that coordinated with the shoes.
By my count, that still leaves me well below our baby’s shoe count. And I’m in no hurry to catch up. If anything, I’d like to sneak some of these ridiculous shoes to someone who might actually wear them out, such as the family cat (if she indeed wears a Size 1).
I realize I won’t win this argument in my home or any other. I’d bet since the cavemen, there have been women talking about how cute the shoes look with a man staring at his feet and wondering why he didn’t have something covering his toes while he was out clubbing animals for food.
I can’t put my finger on what the baby shoes are supposed to do anyway. My best guess is they keep her socks from falling off.
And it keeps my wife happy — even if baby doesn’t need a new pair of shoes.