Learning to Tie

Last year when Dr. Peds left to do the back-to-school shoe shopping (he’s a lovely dad, and so good with shoes) I begged him to please find not-tying gym shoes for Mr. TOF. I just really believe it’s good to get through kindergarten without the mess of shoe tying.  There are enough adjustments in life with kindergarten.  We don’t need to add footwear stress.

Since I have tall kids, I have kids who wear big shoes, shoes that are sizes larger than the rest of the kids their age.  It is hard to find velcro gym shoes for a kindergartner as tall as Mr. TOF.  He did succeed, finding one pair of velcro shoes last year, and he made a stretchy kind of elastic shoe lace for another pair of tennis shoes that were supposed to be tied.  The special shoelace avoided the actual act of tying and made getting the shoes on a lot easier.

This year Dr. Peds said, “it’s time to learn to tie.”

I said, “OK.”  I knew that he was ready.  They came home with a lovely pair of SIZE 5 tennis shoes.  (YaYa also wears a size 5, so I guess the bookend children of the family can share!)  Dr. Peds gave Mr. TOF a brief lesson in tying, and voila!  He got it.  He’s been practicing for a few days with great success, and those gym shoes are already in his back pack ready to go to first grade this week.

The whole experience was a far cry from Mr. SP’s kindergarten days.  Before he started kindergarten the teacher asked that all the students knew how to tie shoes to make things easier.  Mr. SP did not want to learn to tie shoes, but because it was on a list of things a child needs to know before kindergarten, I was convinced that we needed to master the task.  There was so much fussing.  So much hysteria.  Eventually I had to bribe him with a chocolate chip each time he got the shoe tied. Over and over.  It was utterly exhausting.

My kids all have such different personalities.

All things aside, I love these images.