Sunday Shoes

With four boys, some would think that we could save a little money by using hand-me-downs.  If you thought that, you'd be wrong...

First off, The Boy is twelve years older than The Buddies...  I don't know that anyone has noticed, but styles have changed a little in the past twelve years.  Even if I had kept his out-grown clothes, I'm not sure anyone could be persuaded to wear them.

And, while Z secretly adores the color pink, I'm not sure that I could even convince him to wear anything that had previously belonged to The Princess...

We try to do a little swapping from Buddy to Buddy, but that hasn't really worked out too well either.  One reason is because Z is the biggest of The Buddies, but he's also been voted "Most Likely to Shred the Knees of His Jeans" and "Most Likely to Tear the Sole Cleanly Off a Pair of Perfectly Good Shoes."

And then there's M.  I had high hopes for swaps between M and J.  M could easily hand down shoes and jeans to J, but M has a really bad habit...  He loses things...  Lots of things...  Case in point:  Sunday Shoes.

These were M's Sunday Shoes.  Were, did I say?  Yes, were, because they no longer fit him.  Why do we have perfectly new shoes that don't fit M?  And why don't we give them to J?  Because these shoes were M's previously lost shoes.  Because, they were lost (and then remained lost) for so long, they will no longer will fit anybody, including J...

The Buddies got new Sunday Shoes last spring.  They wore them to church only a couple of times before M's inexplicably disappeared.  Seriously, they just disappeared!  We looked, and looked, and looked (for months!).  Inside the house.  Outside the house.  In the car.  In the garage.  In the yard...  We couldn't find them...  Well, I finally found them (both of them!) just before Christmas.  It was an exciting event.

Usually the lost remain that way, so it was with great jubilation that I presented my triumphant discovery to The Mister.  But it was to no avail.  At some point during the Lost Season (approximately March to December), everyone had grown.  ***I guess I'd worry if they hadn't.***  In the meantime, I had refused to buy M new shoes...  I kept hoping we would find them, so we kept taking him to church in sneakers (the horror!).  But now it's been confirmed,  we get to buy new Sunday Shoes for M and probably for everyone else as well.  I'm so excited.

Anyone need a perfectly good pair of size 13.5 shoes?