Defeeted by the Shoe Houdini

I would like the record to show that today is the day that I was officially defeeted.

That's not a misspelling. I. Am. Defeeted.

Mila has always had a thing with shoes. She LOVES them very much. She would own all of the shoes if given the chance. High heels and boots and flip flops and they're all just so great. Shoes rule, you guys! BUT NOT ON HER FEET.

It's one of life's greatest mysteries. The child who can't take a single step towards the door when I'm in a hurry in the morning magically can make shoes vanish like ::poof::. It's wild. One second there are shoes on her feet; the next second you have to travel to West Virginia to find where she stashed her shoes. She's faster than Dash from The Incredibles when it comes to making shoes vanish.

She's the Shoe Houdini.

The way I've typically dealt with her barefoot tendencies is to: 1) Fight a lot. 2) Buy her a lot of cheap shoes because she will wear NEW shoes. For a day. 3) Fight a lot. Summer is great because I can sometimes trick her with flip flops, but no more.

Today is the day when I stopped fighting and let the kid walk around the neighborhood barefoot. There's no going back now. She's destined to be a hillbilly with her crazy hair, dirty face, and bare feet. Truly, though, my biggest worry is that I don't know what she's going to do with all this new extra time on her hands. Now that she won't be spending half of her life taking her shoes off and hiding them, Mila will need a new hobby.

I hope it doesn't involve taking off clothing.

Full Moon

I was going to spare Mila from having the incident recorded for all time, but now she keeps bringing it up, so TOO BAD, KID. I most certainly didn't make her moon half of Chicago; she made a choice.

Oh, yes, she did.

It started out innocently enough. Alexis and Mila were goofing off in the hotel room. Mila was trying to run away and Alexis kept grabbing her and holding her so she would end up doing the Scooby Doo run. It was exactly as hilarious as it sounds, right up until Alexis accidentally snagged a dress and some underwear and the end result was a moon shining bright for us all to see.

No big deal.

Except, Alexis reacted. I swear she will never learn to ignore some parts of life. If she had ignored it, Mila would have quit and that would have been that. But, Grandma Alexis can't ignore a moon. She has to scoff at the inappropriateness of the moon, tattle on the moon giver, and generally express a whole lot of disbelief because LOOK AT THE MOON.

Mila LOVES inappropriateness. It's her brand. Thus, once Alexis was freaked out, Mila knew exactly what she was going to do as often as possible for hours on end.

Mooning Alexis became Mila's favorite new thing. She would not stop, no matter what, and me chiming in on the whole thing made matters worse. We were gifted to several hours of Mila randomly giving peeks at the moon while giggling her fool head off.

It wasn't my favorite thing she's done.

Eventually I managed to get both girls to stop tormenting each other and it all stopped. I thought we were done and were never going to bring it up again, but then Mila. Oh, Mila.

Tonight as we were taking a walk through the neighborhood, Mila began reminiscing. "Remember that time my butt escaped in the Big Chicago? That was so funny!" she said. LOUDLY. Just as a neighbor was approaching us.

It was THAT neighbor. The one who can't walk away from a conversation.

We're going to have to move now, aren't we? Too bad we can't move to Chicago.

Mila Isn't Wrong

On one hand, it's adorable that Mila is making it her job to say "I love you." She says it morning, noon, and night at all kinds of random times. She says it to break the silence. She says it when she does something that might be construed as illegal, I suppose as a way to imply that punishment would be dumb because obviously. She says it when she's being good.

She says it A LOT.

On the other hand, OMG she is a broken record. She uses the phrase as a weapon of mass destruction. She fully expects that you will return fire. If you don't respond with "I love you too, Mila," YOU ARE IN TROUBLE. She'll keep repeating herself and kindly nagging you that you better say it too OR ELSE.

It's a test. Are you paying attention when she talks to you? She's being cute. Are you acknowledging the cute? ARE YOU LISTENING? HUH? ARE YOU?

Alexis and I are both about done with this phase. Yes, it's cute, but it's annoying as well. While we know there are worse ways to be annoying, our patience is running thin. Alexis is in worse shape than me. In fact, during the ride to gymnastics, Mila threw out her line about 236249624 times. She lobbed every test at Alexis and waited about a millisecond before nagging her sister to LISTEN, GAH.

Alexis wasn't listening. Well, she was, but she was refusing to give Mila the satisfaction of knowing she was listening. Thus, she was silent.

So Mila kept saying it.

They went on and on for a while, Alexis immersed in silence while Mila filled every breath with words. Finally, Alexis blurted out, "YOU ARE SO ANNOYING, MILA. Stop it!"

Mila smiled then replied, "I know. Being annoying is my power!"

That's going to be a problem, y'all. HAAAALPPPPP.