Shoe obsession

Baby has a real obsession with shoes. If she sees some, and they are not being worn, she will find a foot and insist that the situation be remedied. If they are dangling casually off a foot, they must be properly fitted. If one is on and one is not in a picture in a book, Baby comments ceaselessly: “Uh oh!” Matching shoes are preferred but not necessary. She’s really quite adamant about it all. Once she found a lonely flip flop at the playground and ran around with it, waving it in the air, checking the feet of all the children, trying to put the shoe in its rightful place. Once I distracted her from that activity, as it was perturbing the other kids, she set about removing all the stray sticks that had dropped on to the mulch. She really likes things to be just so.

Anyway, I have my own shoe obsession. I’ll buy anything else for Baby used, but I seem stuck on the idea that Baby can only wear new shoes of a certain brand. It’s not like me at all.

Here’s her new pair of summer sneakers, which fulfill the following criteria:

–not insanely expensive (by which I mean under 25 dollars, which under any other circumstances would make me gasp as a price for such an ephemerally-used baby item)
–available in size 5.5 M, a little big for now but wearable and should last the summer (somehow we’ve gotten stuck on half-sizes rather than whole; her first pair of non-slipper type shoes were 3.5s)
–pink and green to go with most of her clothes (she also has a nice pair of white sandals for dress-up from her grandmother and a pair of red polka-dot sneakers her godmother gave her for the summer but which don’t have good enough traction for my taste–I am also very concerned with traction)
–great traction!
–close-toed, good for playing on mulch at playgrounds and in the dirt without getting stuff in the shoe
–but they don’t cover her foot altogether, so they won’t be as hot
–no tie-up laces, since nobody in the family has the patience for that
–CUTE

And wearing them to help Daddy water in the new raspberry plant:

And to clamber up the rock-climbing wall (Baby is quite athletic):