Stride Wrong

My local bff, we'll call her "B", has been handing me down a bunch of clothes, toys, and shoes lately and I'm thrilled. But some of them just weren't very cute. I don't complain, though cause most of the shoes were Stride Rite brand anyway and I always try to get M several pairs of these as they are better comfort fit shoes for kids.

In the not so distant past, M was having an issue of always falling down...sometimes even when standing still, so I thought maybe some good shoes would help. I hit a consignment sale several weeks ago and got 1 pair of nice leather closed toe sandals, 1 very nice pair of th*ong type sandals with a butterfly decorations on them, 1 pair of mary jane type tennis shoes with Mermaid decorations and panels for "air conditioning", and a pair of sandals that can be worn in or out of the water. I figured that I was set with those, all of which were stride rite brand with the exception of the water shoe. They do, however, carry similar types of water shoes at stride rite.

The day after I got those shoes, I got a stride rite coupon in the mail! hahahahaha! I just had to laugh. So I passed the coupon on to my SIL since those are hard to come by. Then B starts cleaning out (early spring cleaning) and she finds all these shoes in M's size and gives them to me. There are a cute pair of target sandals (pink with butterflies), an ugly pair of stride rite mary jane tennis shoes that are covered in dirt and a bit of paint. Then today she finds 2 pairs of winter boots (hope we're still in that size when fall hits), a pair of pink hiking boots (perfect if we pick up camping as we are hoping to do), and another pair of stride rite sandals. They are a little plain and kind of dirty, but I think with a bit of cleaning they'll be quite nice and kind of traditional.

(will post the pic of them after they are cleaned up later)

So, I got to thinking about how to improve the initial pair of dirty "play shoes" as B said. I thought to myself, M would never choose these shoes even for playing. How can I improve them? As my mom said, I could try anything cause they couldn't get much worse. So, on my day off last thursday I took a stroll through Hobby Lobby (right by my house) to get ideas. And I had lots of ideas. I finally landed on the idea of silver glitter and sequins. Silver can mix and match with lots of things and M loves sparkle!


First I had to clean them, so I googled it and wikihow suggested cleaning them with toothpaste. M and I made a day of it (note this is actually a Montessori activity). We got out a towel, a huge bowl of warm water, some toothpaste, and an old toothbrush. It worked and we had a good time doing it. In fact, after I cleaned them I almost didn't want to decorate them.

(See the clean one next to the dirty one? That was my delayed thought to do a before and after pic but it works)

But I'm glad I did cause after I used flip flop glue to adhere a double layer of glitter and strategically placed sequins, M can not wait to wear these to school!