Shoe Fiasco: notes from the weekend

Yesterday was St Patrick's day, the day when all Americans pretend to be Irish by wearing green and milling around New York, not drinking, just like real Irish people. Anyway, it was co-incidentally nice out, so we found ourselves in Central Park, where Bluet tried her best to jump in the boating lake, but was thwarted (see video). She also found herself some green sun glasses which were of some fascination for a while. But she became distracted long enough that we did not have to take them home.

Check out the blue sky, Bluet and people in green

Later we met up with Steve and Caroline.

Today, we headed out to buy Bluet some shoes and get some lunch. When I was little, I remembered the shoe buying process as quite laborious, as a fastidious shoe shop clerk would measure your feet with some crazy mechanical contraption, then find some well made but boring and uncomfortable leather shoes ideally designed for growing feet. This was not the case even in the Step Rite (equivalent of Start Rite), where unhelpful shop staff took forever to measure Bluet's feet, and the shoes that fitted her were only available in synthetic pink materials. This process took so long that even though Bluet enjoyed playing with the kids in the shoe shop for a while (it was very busy) she eventually got too hungry and/or we did, so we that we left without purchasing anything. Although I was thinking of making Bluet go barefoot to avoid undergoing this horrific process ever again, I realised that as we now know her shoe size (4 1/2, extra wide) we can order her shoes off Amazon from the comfort of our own home, and never ever go into a children's shoe shop again.

As long as her feet don't grow. So all in all a thoroughly successful shopping trip, aside from the failure to buy shoes, and the missing salad in Emily's lunch.