How can this be?

My daughter hates shoes. She is literally afraid of her shoes. All of them. I. Am. Not. Kidding. How could this happen to me? To you?! Yes, to me! I honestly don’t care why she doesn’t like shoes, but she’s my kid, how can this be? Because, for those of you who don’t know me, I love shoes, I live for shoes, I will buy crappy, cheap clothes and dress them up with uber expensive shoes. I literally own hundreds of pairs of shoes, to my husband’s endless despair. So to have a daughter who cries, shaking and screaming whenever I try to put shoes on her, seriously, it’s the universe punishing me, terribly and unequivocally for all of the ills in the world.

Just to give you an example, these are her first shoes:

These she wore (of course she did, she wasn’t even aware of actually having feet back then). But then, and this is where I believe it all went to sh*t, once she started moving around I put her in Robeez, or Robeez-like shoes. She has like twenty pairs (in her current size, not overall, are you kidding me!), I love these slipper like shoes because they’re comfortable, adorable (she’s got them with flowers, and butterfies, and ladybugs, and kitties, and doggies… in pink, and white, and green, and blue, and red and… well, you get the picture), and it’s like she’s barefoot all the time, but her feet are protected better than just with socks. But of course there comes a time when you want to dress up your little girl and put her in a cute pair of patent leather mary janes (for example), or the temperature drops and you want her to wear the cutest pair of teeny tiny brown baby uggs, and she stares at her feet wide eyed and starts shaking her arms and legs and emitting a high-pitched, siren-like screech that makes your blood run cold, and you wonder… is she really mine?

Now, of course I know she’s mine. Apart from the fact that I watched her being born, and that for the first month of her life she looked exactly like her brother, so no chance of her having been switched in the hospital (seriously, some pictures of the two of them the husband and I are like, huh, which one is this? Oh, wait, is that a little pink corner of a baby blanket? Huh, it must be the girl then), now she looks exactly like me (at her age, I’m not trying to imply I have the complexion of a one year old). So basically no chance of her not belonging in this family. But she hates shoes. How can this be? But most importantly, how do I solve this? brain washing? Maybe I can make shoes an integral part of her life, I’m thinking a shoe shaped bed, shoe print sheets and towels, maybe a shoe stuffed animal or two, just so that she starts feeling comfortable with the concept… I can even read her that nursery rhyme… there was an old lady who lived in a shoe…

But seriously, I have to get her over her aversion to shoes, I refuse to have a barefoot Christmas, or New Years. Plus, on a practical level, it’s snowing now, and she’s walking, at this point I can’t even let her out in the yard lest she get frostbite. I mean really, I can’t let those Uggs go to waste, and there’s another pair, in pink, on its way to me from the US. What do I do? I mean, really, what do I do? Said the old lady who lives for her shoes….