Shoes....where art thou shoes?

I’ve had to make some adjustments in the last couple months, as our little girl is now going to preschool as well as Luke.  One of the main differences is that Luke is limited to the sidewalk when he is playing outside, where our little girl gets to run all over the playground.  That may not seem like a huge thing, but it has definitely made me change our routine on what we do right when we get home and right before we leave.

In the past I would feed the kids lunch, get them dressed, and put on shoes and socks in the living room area.  Then we would all troop out the door.  When we got home we would all troop towards the living room and take off shoes there and then head to beds for naps.

Now that our little girl gets nice and dirty at school, I’ve had to find ways to get them both to stop right inside the door to clean up before going to the rest of the house.  At first I did this by making them both sit on the ground and take off shoes.  I soon found that wasn’t the greatest because we were often sitting in dirt.

Next step, I used a couple chairs that grandpa made and placed them near the back door.  This worked well, although the chairs couldn’t be used for the table that they were made for.  So I asked grandpa to make a bench.  This is our new dropping off and putting on of shoes location. 

Why am I boring you with all these details?  All of this led up to a pretty funny moment last week.  You see, for the sake of easiness I have been keeping all the kids shoes under the bench that they sit on to put them on and take them off.  One day last week, I looked all over the place for the shoes!  They just disappeared!  I couldn’t figure it out.  I know I put them there!  But maybe I put them in the hall closet…but no….they weren’t there either.  I looked upstairs, thinking maybe they got put there for some reason.  Maybe I was just losing my mind!

The good part about this was that it happened on a day without school.  Otherwise I would have been frantic.  Because of that, I gave up my search and focused on feeding the kids and cleaning up the house…in hopes of finding them somewhere. Finally that afternoon, I went to the small closet in the laundry room to get a broom out to clean up the floor from lunch, and what did I find?

You got it!  Shoes!!  Now who would put them there along with the cleaning supplies?  Hhmmmmm…I wonder.  Oh it was so funny!  Luke was up to his old tricks.  The worst part was that he did it and I had no idea.  He was being a little sneaky guy!