We don’t own bunnies.  Never have, never will, never felt a need to…but from what I hear they have an uncanny ability to dramatically multiply.  You don’t even need water (random Gremlins reference – respect!), just some happy bunnies and a whole lotta room.

I’m starting to wonder if shoes share this capacity to quadruple on demand.

At this very moment I’m staring at our shoe basket, a Target acquisition born of sheer desperation to stop kicking footwear every day.  The kids got older and just when I finally didn’t find myself stepping on sharp edged Legos anymore it changed over to shoes.  Flip flops, sneakers, slides, sandals – all manner of shoes, all over the place.

Scattered across the family room, carelessly dropped in the kitchen.  I’ll even stumble across them in a hallway occasionally.  Sometimes there’ll be two or three pairs strewn about, all for the same kid, all kicked off with complete disregard for the next time they’d be needed.  (Leading to the inevitable “MOM!  Where are my sneakers?!”)

I’ll see this plethora of footwear and think to myself damn, how many shoes have we bought you?  I mean, they’re just gonna outgrow them in six months, so we figure neither one of them needs a closet full of shoes right now anyway.  I don’t know what my purchase policy will have to become once their feet stop growing, but that’s a problem for another day.

At any rate, it didn’t matter if I stubbed my toe kicking a shoe or stepped on it and turned an ankle; both are equally annoying and painful.  I knew something had to change once I reached the point of hurtling sneakers across the room in frustration – thus the basket and it’s endless mountain of footwear.

Only three people in this house use it.  BrightSide manages to use his actual closet to hold his shoes, a concept that’s apparently so foreign to the children they cannot begin to follow through on that plan themselves.  I keep a pair (okay, sometimes two) in the family room basket so I have something to slip on if I need to run outside.

Which leaves two other small(ish) people adding shoes to the pile.

I’ll take a moment to describe this container, lest you think I’m being unreasonable.  I’m not talking about a picnic basket here.  It’s roughly the size of a small round laundry basket, only made of a pretty woven material (as if that’s going to dress up the enormous load of shoes sitting in the middle of the house, but whatever), and it’s almost always filled to overflowing.

Overflowing!  It takes about nine or ten pairs of shoes to do that which means, if I’ve done the math correctly, there are certain people in this house who don’t have any shoes in their freaking closet.

What. The. What.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if all the shoes simply disappeared one night.  If they went to bed with every single piece of footwear they own left in the family room only to wake and find an empty basket the next morning?  It would be, at the very least, entertaining.

Maybe the footwear fairy needs to drop by our house a few times.  We all know they’re afraid to go in people’s closets (and who could blame them, really, once you’ve experienced opening Bear’s closet doors).  That might be just the push these kids need to put their stinking shoes away.