My good friend HC called me up and wanted to see me. So I rushed around getting ready and ran out the door 20 minutes later.
See, this is where I don't get why moms can't get out of the house in a decent timeframe. I can understand it if you've got more than one kid (because one will disappear when you're in a hurry), or your kid is a toddler and refusing to put his shoes on. Then you're forgiven. But if you have a baby that still relies on you to get around most of the time and to put on his shoes, then I don't see why you can't leave the house in 20 minutes or less. I had to wake Grace up from a nap, change her outfit (she needed to wear a more festive and patriotic outfit than what she was wearing), change her from a cloth diaper to a disposable, pack her lunch and dinner, make sure I had enough diapers and wipes to last the day, put on makeup, and find my shoes -- and I was ready to go in twenty minutes.
HC lives sort of near Tacoma, so it was a lovely drive down to her home. Plus I figured out how to make my mp3 player work in my car. The FM transmitter that I have doesn't output much if you're on battery power, and since my car antenna is in the rear of the car, every time I tried to use my mp3 player it would be annoyingly fuzzy. Yesterday I got smart and used the car charger to power the FM transmitter, and I was jammin' to my own tunes down to HC's home, into Tacoma, and home again!
HC decided to show me a locals' beach, one of those places that none of the tourists know about but everyone who lives there full-time does. Being Washington, the shore was rocky instead of sandy, so I kept Grace in my backpack, but HC's kids got to comb the beach for shells and interesting rocks. The view of Mt Rainier from the shore was amazing. There are photos on my Flickr page if you're interested.
Then the kids wanted to go to the mall, I kid you not! So it was off to the Tacoma Mall, where I ended up buying Grace MORE clothes! Kurt always jokes that she's got more clothes than he does, which is true. But then she's a girl, so inherently she's going to have more clothes, and then since I am being constantly informed on how quickly children grow, I try to keep some bigger sizes available for the day I realize she doesn't fit into anything she owns.
Of course, Grace is an oddball child who is growing, but not nearly as quickly as I was led to believe. I kept getting told that she'd grow out of this or that in a matter of weeks. That just never happened. She's just recently growing into some size 3 shoes in the last few weeks; her feet were pretty much the same size from January to about mid-June. Maybe it's all the standing she's doing that's causing her feet to grow!!!
Which reminds me -- I have this terrible habit of talking to strangers when I'm shopping. One day I was perusing the clearance shoe rack at Sears when I saw this grandmother-type looking through the shoes as well. I mentioned how I have the most absurdly wide feet, and the grandmother-type replied that one of her grandkids has the same problem because the only shoes she'll wear are flip-flops and sneakers, ie, the type of shoes that let your feet spread out.
In other words, if you wear dress shoes on a constant basis, it will restrict the growth and/or width of your feet.
This is supposed to be a good thing?!?!
I never understood the thinking behind not wearing sneakers because then your feet will spread out. I think at that point shoe manufacturers should be making slightly wider shoes to account for that spread! It's not like God or Nature, whatever you believe in, intended us to wear too-tight shoes on a constant basis. If He had, then we'd all have extremely narrow feet!!
Plus most of the so-called "wide" shoes that I have encountered in the world of dress shoes are not measureably wider than their medium-width counterparts. For my senior prom I ordered $50 dress sandals in a double wide (a 7WW is technically what I wear, although I normally settle for an 8W for most shoe styles) in hopes they would be wide enough for my feet. When I got them, I was extremely disappointed that my toes didn't even fit into them because they weren't wide at all.
And what's up with so-called "comfort shoe" companies that don't sell shoes in a wide?! Naturalizer believes a wide is a C width, which is barely wider than the medium B width. Wides should be at least a D. Easy Spirit sells very few wide widths, and most of them are old-lady looking (no offense to any old ladies reading this drivel). Clark's, Birkenstocks, White Mountain... all these shoes promote "healthy" and "comfort" shoes, yet few of them carry styles in a wide. So I guess those of us with wide feet aren't intended to have comfortable shoes.
Maybe I should just start an extremely wide width shoe company that sells cute shoes!!
Why oh why must I have a shoe fetish when I have such hard-to-fit feet?!?!
Life is not fair! :o)