The Dreaded Back to School Shopping

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a fan of shopping. I consider it to be a hobby of mine and often joke that I would like to be a professional shopper just so I could spend other people’s money. I never seem to grow tired of it. That’s until it comes to shopping for back to school. There’s something about it that puts a finality to summer that makes me grouchy.

Even with all of this dislike, my children are usually pretty easy to appease. Uniforms make shopping easy, even if they are boring and ugly as my daughter points out. Still, they are quite content with the standard uniforms and never really make specific requests. That is until this year.

Apparently, all of the nine year old boys that my son knows are wearing Reebok Zigs. Hmmm…. Is my nine year old growing up? I’ll leave that to contemplate later.

What was important was finding these shoes. He of course didn’t know the name of the shoes. I brought him to several shoe stores where he passed over every shoe looking for what he could only describe as being blue with a wavy bottom.

We ended up at the mall where we made our way through several more shoe stores with him taking all of five seconds to glance at the available shoes and tell me he didn’t like any of them.

I must say, to my own surprise, I hadn’t lost my patience at this point. I actually encouraged him to keep looking for the shoes he wanted.

We finally located the shoes in Foot Locker. They had the shoe, but not the color he wanted. So I finally got a look at the shoes we’d gone to five shoe stores looking for. All I will say is that I thought they were the ugliest shoes and gulp…. Seventy-five dollars.

Was I really going to pay that much for a shoe that he would outgrow in five months max?

I studied the shoe and then his face for a long time, asking him several times if this was the shoe he really wanted (adding that it was ugly and if I paid that much money for a shoe he’d have to wear it until it fell apart.)

He remained steadfast in his desire for the shoe.

His determination to have those shoes brought me back to the school shopping I’d done at that age. I’d wanted the expensive clothes that everyone else was wearing, but my mom had always said no. My mom still tells the story about a pair of Guess jeans I carried around the store, wanting desperately, but my mom had warned me that it would be the only jeans I’d get if she had to pay that much money for them. I’d ended up putting the jeans back on the rack, but it hadn’t stopped me from wanting them.

Sigh. Yes, you guessed it. I shelled out the eighty- five dollars after tax for the shoes. They should arrive any day, since they are so popular we actually had to order his size.

I know that this was only the beginning of his requests. (I’m mentally blocking out the knowledge that fashionista's dauther’s requests will come fast and hard.) I think I’m in trouble.