new shoes

so, per one of our previous posts, you know that boden had nearly nothing to wear for this cold weather season. he had been wearing the same two outfits for nearly the whole week, when saturday he peed out of his diaper while taking a nap at grammy's while daddy helped grammy plant another tree. wouldn't be the end of the world, but well, it was the last 'clean' warm outfit to his name and we were already running late to meet brett, sara, and evan for a bike ride (again, more about that later :)). so, we stripped him down, put him in his coat, whisked him out to the truck, put his pants and shirt over the air vent and turned it up high. buy the time we got to the trail head, they were nearly dry, so we put them back on and off we went. am i a horrible mother or what? feeling convicted, i decided to go shopping come rain or shine sunday afternoon to clothe my child. of course, since then there has been only one day cold enough to wear the warm clothes that i bought him and even that was pushing it, but i just wanted him to wear the warm clothes i had finally gotten him:)

ok, what does this have to do with shoes? well, like you know, boden has been getting better and better at being mobile on two feet. though he still only takes about two or three steps at a time, it seems his world has begun to open to him that he does not need to be on all fours nor does he want mom and dad to carry him around constantly. it seems that this occurs to him almost every time we are outside or in a place that i really don't want to set him down. thus, his small white socks are being destroyed (yes, i got new socks too :) ). we thought, this boy needs some shoes! so, i held his monster foot up to my hand to get a rough measure (from the base of my palm to the tip of my pinky) and off i went. found some super cute camo sandals at gap outlet, but the smallest size was a 6. thought they might be too big for him, but they were cheap and i thought, maybe he could wear them next year. i stood for a long time at target looking at four of the cutest little pair of shoes ever made and willing myself to not buy all four. they were 13 bucks apiece and we had been thinking of getting stride right shoes for him, but needed something right away, so i was only supposed to get one pair. sometimes i feel like i need to get him everything cute i find in the store. what am i going to do if we ever have a girl :) anyway, i was good, and only took home one pair of very cute size 3's. when i got home and showed the boys all my finds, we realized that the 3's looked way too small and tried the size 6 sandals on him. fit great!

at first boden was all fussy and didn't like having them attached to his feet. we showed him that mommy and daddy had on shoes too and got him up to walk on them. it must have connected, because he got super excited and squealy and started going to town walking around (holding our hands of course). we walked a little bit inside, then took him outside to try them out. he was in heaven. i'll attach a couple photos to this post, but check out the side bar and we'll put a link to all the pictures in this adventure. notice that he started out with a letter toy in his hands but soon discarded it for sticks he would find on our walk and would stop every so often to pick up another stick or sort out the ones he already had.