As I sit at Barnes and Noble, and watch my child and his new friend play together (and thank the book gods for the train table’s return), I realize that I’ve nearly forgotten my melancholy attitude some twenty minutes ago.  Having a moment to breathe, I can step outside of myself and examine the cause of this acute depression.  It’s shoes.

No worries, friends.  I don’t have depression disorder, but as so many of us do, I have allowed myself to fall into that typical, rainy day, “my child loves shoes too much”, funk.  I mean, we’ve all been there, right?  Oh.  Your child isn’t obnoxiously obsessed with shoes?  He doesn’t follow you around demanding you take off and replace his shoes and socks for ridiculous and consecutive periods of time?  Hmmm.

Today started off right.  Rick and I made an awkwardly humorous music video (one of my very favorite things to do), we went to the store and let Jack ride in his grocery cart car, and we even had time to watch some shows on DVR before Rick’s bedtime.  It was after Jack’s nap that things started going down.  Towards the floor.  Where the shoes are.

I’m almost positive Jack’s first word was “shoes”.  If not, it was definitely in the top five.  I was actually feeling pretty energetic about getting things done today, but every time I started to work on something I was greeted by my tiny little human, asking me to take off or put on his shoes or socks.  Over.  And over.  Again.  Then, he moved on to Dada shoes and Mama shoes.  It was adorable.  He asked so sweetly, “Shoes?” every time.  I am his only playmate at the moment (during the week) and I feel a huge responsibility to give him the human interaction he needs.

Finally, after an hour of shoe entertainment, he moves on to my socks.  He wanted to take them off of my feet and put them on his.  It got to a point where to save effort, I put on multiple pairs of socks so it would take him more time to get all of them off of me.  I sat on the couch and mindlessly let my child remove my socks.  At this point, I’m afraid Jack really wasn’t getting any social interaction.  Mommy had become a sock zombie, who desperately needed some Vitamin D.  I was going to destroy all the socks.  Really.  I was going to take all of his socks and my socks and Dada’s socks and anything in our home that resembled socks or shoes or something you can put on your feet, and throw them in my driveway with a nice gasoline topping.  This includes buckets, vases, bowls, hats, small boxes, oven mitts, and baskets.  Then, I was going to light a match and throw it on the pile and walk away slowly, but with power without looking back.  This family was going to be a barefoot family for the rest of time.   Jack would forget all about socks and wonder why the rest of the world had such soft dainty feet.  We would be famous as the family who didn’t wear shoes.  Our feet would grow calloused and be able to withstand any pressure changes or weather conditions.  We would make lots and lots of money off of coal-walking and barefoot lifestyle promotions.  We’d start a new movement and all of America would get in heated debates over whether shoes were or were not disconnecting our children from becoming one with nature.  It would become a new topic in politics.

This is the point at which I realized that we needed to get out of the house.  So, here we are, saying the word “choo choo” over and over and over again.  Distracted from our awesome shoes and that which they hold by a nice little boy who “thought I was going to throw up last night, but I didn’t”.  His very pleasant and obviously embarrassed mother is ensuring me that she did not bring a sick child to the bookstore.  I want to tell her that I could care less about her kid’s germs and that I just appreciate her talking to me, and that a few minutes ago I was going to start a very dramatic bonfire in my driveway.  I think I’ll just say “choo choo” instead.