Twinkle-Toe Torture

I am exhausted with school already, and all I’ve done is buy school clothes and school supplies.

Yes, this weekend The Kiddo and I went back-to-school shopping to take advantage of some sales that were going on.

The Kiddo tends to be a clothes horse, and one who would buy one of every color if my purse and my better sense would allow it. So this year I did something that was labor intensive for me, but saved me from pulling out my hair in the store.

I pre-shopped on-line. It took some doing. First I found the on-line stores where the sales were, and then I was able to find out what was actually in-stock at our brick-and-mortar version.

Presto, I printed out pictures of each shirt and jeans, figured my budget and decided how many shirts and jeans and so forth she could get.

Sounds a little OCD, you say? You’ve never been in the seventh circle of hell, AKA, a dressing room with a picky kiddo with an I-want complex in said dressing room.

The Kiddo and I carefully flipped through all the pictures, and she decided ahead of time which ones she liked and which ones she didn’t. I hammered into her head the magic numbers of how many she could get in each category.

I did the same with shoes, printing off a photo of a pair of heavily decorated canvas sneakers with lots of glitter and something called twinkle-toes. I figured for sure I was going to be paying 40 bucks for those sapsuckers. This is a child who will one day be wearing Manolo Blahniks for certain, as she loves and adores shoes.

But no. The Kiddo surprised me.

The Kiddo really liked the Twinkle Toes shoes – to look at. But if you wiggled your feet even the slightest bit, the sneakers lit up like a Christmas tree – a fiber-optic Christmas tree with halogen twinkle lights. They were impossible to ignore, and across the nation, sometime very soon, otherwise mild-mannered teachers are going to be ordering hits on the genius who designed these garish sneakers and the parents who sent their girl-babies to school thusly shod.

The Kiddo gave a long and wistful look at the Twinkle Toes and shook her head. “Maybe if they had an on-and-off switch,” she told me as she settled for a pair of shoes without the light show. “Or maybe if the battery would run down in a hurry.”

I chuckled at that, remembering all the very loud toys that misguided non-parent folks gave The Kiddo over the years, because I knew the rule of such devices: the more obnoxious the sound or light, the longer the battery lasts.