Did you know that pregnancy can make your feet grow?  And that that will, in return, reliably reduce you to tears while shoe shopping?

I’m a tall girl, but my feet have always been a manageable size 10.  Sure, my pants are consistently too short, but my feet were still a nice, normal size, and shoe shopping was one of the few kinds of shopping I enjoyed.

Until I had an adorable, squishy little baby (incidentally, who was called Squishy).

Now I have size 11 feet.  I have an adorable baby and feet that are too large to fit comfortably into any of my shoes.  After getting fed up with my toes rubbing against the inside of my ancient tennis shoes while I walked, I decided to find some new shoes.

I got my feet remeasured, and was aghast to learn my feet had grown to an unruly size.  Not to be deterred, I figured that surely I’d be able to find size 11 tennis shoes.  I mean, how hard could it be?  There are taller women than me running around all over the place, I doubted they all get their shoes custom made.

That was when I ate my humble pie with a side of ice cream.

You guys, no one makes shoes in size 11.  You get to size 10 and then you get nothing.  We looked everywhere, and my despair grew with each successive store where sales people made horrified faces and told me they had nothing for me in-store but could always order something (which, dude, how not helpful is that?  Like I’m just going to guess about how my feet will feel by trying on shoes that are too small?  Or, worse yet, just ordering without trying them on?).

Every time I walked by rows and rows of shoes that were off-limits to me and my giant freak feet, I cried.  I mean, I can deal with being tall, with the short pants and no leg room in cars or on planes, but to be deprived of shoes now too?

After watching me dissolve into tears for the fifth time, Wes decided I needed to go shoe shopping at Nordstrom.  Nordstrom, where they sell pretty shoes to pretty people and make you feel like spending twice as much is a good deal because of the famous excellent customer service.

On Saturday, I got all dolled up (putting on eye shadow and eye liner counts as getting dolled up) and we strolled into Nordstrom fully expecting to leave there with shoes and self esteem.  That the shoe salesman botched the sale boggles the mind.  Perhaps it’s because he:

1. Told me he’d rather be watching the World Cup than helping me find shoes.
2. Brought out only one freaking pair of shoes for me to try on, then told me he had nothing else in my size (which, seeing as he was so enthusiastic to be doing his job right then, was probably a great big lie).
3. Tried to convince me that, even though I told him the shoes he brought out didn’t feel good on my feet, I should wear them around for a week because he was sure I’d grow to like them.
4. After I assured him, in no uncertain terms, that I disliked the shoes, he brought out another pair.  When I slipped them on and told him they felt tight, he looked at me like I was stupid and said, “Yeah, they’re 10’s”.  I suppose when you taunt big-footed women with shoes they can’t have because of their giant feet, they’re unwilling to buy things from you.

With nap time for Aidan fast approaching, we ran over to Lady Foot Locker, where the saleslady (named Jazzy) brought out ten different boxes of shoes for me to try on.  She enumerated the features and strengths of each pair, and was patient as I tried them all on and walked around the store.

I finally settled on a pair of Nike shoes that feel like heaven on my feet.  So the shoe problem has been resolved.  I remain in shock over the abysmal customer service I received at Nordstrom, but I’m so happy with my new (very purple!) shoes that I’m willing to stop complaining about it.  Now that I’ve written about it on my blog, of course.

Do you remember that post I did last week wherein I mentioned my gigantic glasses of many years ago?  Well, Blanche commented that I can’t very well blog about my ginormous glasses without sharing them, so I did what any good self-effacing blogger would: I scanned me a picture of those suckers and, let me tell you, I am THIIIIIS glad they invented contacts because man.  I’m lucky the sun didn’t set me aflame with glasses like that.

Was that enough suspense building?  I hope so, because I present to you with the utmost shame and cringe…My 5th grade portrait:

Oh look at me, just casually hanging out on this stair railing.

You’re welcome.  I hope you all feel better about yourselves today.

Piercings.  I love them, I have them, I can’t keep them.  Not many people know this, but at one point in my life I had seven piercings on my person.  There were three in each ear and one over my belly-button.  I’ve never been particularly skinny, so not many people ever saw the belly-button piercing, but it was there and I loved it.

I think piercings, when done artfully, are beautiful.  I’m not saying I want my ears gauged large enough to stick a fist through or anything, but I’ve seen some people do beautiful things with their piercings.  I once met a girl who’d woven silver wire through a bunch of holes in her ear and it was gorgeous.  It can be a real art, in my opinion.

My parents consented to let me pierce my ears for the first time when I was 12, and I did my darndest to keep the piercings clean.  I was plagued by miserable infections, but still I doggedly kept them in and cleaned them twice a day like I was supposed to.  Eventually (as in four years later) they stopped hurting so dang much so I figured the time was ripe for another set of piercings.  My best friend and I went in and got a second set of holes put in right above the ones we already had.

Those seemed to heal quicker, so I got a third set of earrings, these ones high up in my cartilege.  I’ll never forget how they crunched when they were put in!  I thought I was looking pretty cool with my piercings, and had always wanted to try a belly-button ring, so right after high school graduation I laid down on a table and watched as some random piercing person put a huge freaking needle through my stomach.  Very weird, I must admit.

Now I was looking pretty cool, though not nearly hard-core.  I merely looked like a girl who liked earrings.  I loved my new look, and thought it was decidedly at ease with the person I thought I was my freshmen year of college.

Then the honeymoon ended.  I started having a hard time sleeping, and I realized that it was because my cartilage piercings were painful to sleep on at night.  I tried taking them out one night but, when I woke the next morning, found I couldn’t get them back in my ears.  Trying to re-pierce cartilage at 6AM is so not worth the effort so I shambled off to work and bid a solemn farewell to one set of piercings.

Next to go was my belly-button ring.  It started hurting.  A lot.  About five months after I got it I started feeling this terrible burning pain all the time, and I was never able to change the piercing without problems.  It simply wasn’t healing, and to add weirdness to it, it also started migrating out.  The reason, it turns out, is that my skin was rejecting it.  My skin literally pushed my belly-button ring out, and I now have a fantastic scar there from the two months it took me to get what was going on.  So, goodbye to that one as well.

I removed my second set of earrings for my wedding and forgot to put them in again after the honeymoon.  When I finally remembered, the holes were long gone.  Four years of healing, gone just like that after one week.  I’m left with one measly set of piercings.  How very tame.

The reason I bring all this up is that I tried to put earrings into my ears for church on Sunday.  And couldn’t get them in.  I had to re-pierce my ears for the millionth time, and it occurred to me that I will never have problem-free piercings.  Ever.  Do you know why?  Because I’ve had these piercings since I was 12, which, in two weeks, will officially be half my life.  If half my lifetime is not enough time for my ears to heal properly, they’re never going to do it until I’m 100 years old and my earlobes are situated somewhere around my ankles and the holes are large enough to use as football goalposts.

Do you have any idea what would have happened if I’d liked tattoos instead?  I’d probably have started off with a pretty butterfly or something and ended up with some ugly sailor flipping me the bird.