finicky feet

Feet have been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember.  First it was my own feet.  I've always had narrow feet--so narrow that regular, medium width shoes would fall off my feet.  Growing up we had a really hard time finding me shoes because narrows were few and far between, and always more expensive.  As time has gone on, narrows are even harder to find.  They just don't make them.  And if they do, they're usually not really "stylish."  Since having children, my feet aren't quite as narrow as they've always been, and I can often make do with medium width shoes, but only in certain shoes.  I'm still very hard to fit.  It doesn't help that they're a size 10 or 10.5 (a size they hardly even make!).  Bigger sizes are always harder to find, so I usually don't even think about finding them in a narrow.  Sometimes I can find them online, but that's not very often, and they're usually way more than I want to spend.

Enter my children.  Two more sets of finicky feet.  Rachel's inherited my narrow feet.  There are about three brands that even make narrow shoes for children, and you can usually only find them online.  And they cost an arm and a leg. I find as many of them as I can that are gently used on ebay or in resale stores, but it's like going on a treasure hunt, trying to find them. And she grows out of them way before they wear out.  So I HATE spending the money on shoes she won't wear for long.  But I've always told myself that I can justify it because Rebecca will be able to wear them eventually. 

Except Rebecca doesn't have narrow feet like her sister!!  She doesn't even have medium feet.  She has WIDE feet.  Just like Daddy (another hard to fit person in the family, but I don't usually pick out his shoes, so I don't have to worry quite so much about him).  So I have a huge bin of expensive shoes that were Rachel's and none of them will fit her sister (unless her feet thin out--Rachel's started out wide, but by the time she was Rebecca's age they had thinned out--so far Rebecca's haven't).  And wides aren't so easy to find either.  Easier than narrows, for sure, but still not easy to find them inexpensively.  Do you know how much I'd love to walk in to Target or Kohl's or Payless or somewhere like that and buy a pair of shoes on sale for my kids (or myself, for that matter)????  No, for me it's Stride Rite, Nordstroms, or the internet.  (And Stride Rite and Nordstroms don't always come through, either--sometimes online, but rarely in the stores anymore.)  Ugh.

So Rebecca's growing out of the shoes she got for Christmas, and the shoes I have from Rachel aren't fitting her.  She'll get a new pair of tennis shoes for her birthday (hopefully I can put it off until then), but there's the question of sandals and dress shoes, and then shoes for fall....and on and on.  If her feet don't get thinner so Rachel's old ones fit her, I don't know what I'm going to do.  My husband doesn't understand why anyone needs more than two pair of shoes anyway, so I get no sympathy from him. (He has a pair of tennis shoes and a pair of dress shoes.  That's it.  Oh yeah, hiking boots--I guess maybe she's allowed three pairs, in his book.)  

So there's my plight.  If any of you run across narrow shoes (and now wide shoes, too!) for a good price, let me know.  I'm ALWAYS on the lookout.