New shoes

It must have been the prayer requests that I sent around yesterday... because Bright Eyes had a great day.

First off, we put on his new shoes. These are shoes that have been hanging around the house for at least two months. He is notoriously fussy about what he wears and will not wear anything interesting (no pictures, patterns or cute colours) or new. So given that his current shoes are getting too small I knew it was going to be a hard job to put new ones on him.

For a few months I've been pointing out the shoes, holding them up against his feet ("No no no no no no") and talking about them. Yesterday I "lost" his old shoes and tried to put the new ones on, but he ran screaming into the other room, so I miraculously "found" the old ones again to reassure him.

Today though, we managed to get one new one on. At that point, he got upset, but not uncontrollably. I stopped him from pulling the shoe off, got him on my knee and gave him a cuddle for about five minutes. Then I picked up a few favourite books, and we read together for a while. I got the second shoe on when he was happy, and again did the cuddle and the book routine so he wouldn't take it off.

At that point, he was still protesting mildly, so I kept him close to me for the rest of the morning before we went out. If he even had a minute alone, I figured he would have taken it off, so he didn't get a chance.

End result: the shoes stayed on all through church. He walked there and back in them and didn't complain. Hooray.