Shoes & Tags

I have to jump ahead a few years just so I can write about my experience today. I suppose it's just another day living with a gifted child but I will never get used to the things he focuses on. We went today to buy new shoes because he is learning to tie his own shoes now. It's funny how he can do advanced math and tell you the name of every president but he can't tie his own shoes! Anyway, we stopped at the store and as he looked around at all the kid shoes he was pretty disappointed at the selection. He did not want a pair of shoes with a character on them (he watches no television unless it's educational and so he has no interest in superheroes or cartoon characters). Then I saw his eyes light up as he was jumping for the top shelf, a plain white pair with the number 32 written on the top. "Look!" He yelled, as he jumped up and down - it's a pair of big boy shoes with a number on them and it's also the number of Perek Lamed Bais (which is something he is learning in school right now). Dream come true!

If that wasn't enough to just make this shoe experience weird, as we were trying on the shoes, he noticed the tag on the box had a sale sticker on it(numbers, his favorite thing). It was a cardboard sticker that was attached to the box and stood straight up. He started scanning the floor for more of these unassuming tags in hopes of finding more. We were in luck, another one had fallen off a box and rolled under the chair he was sitting on. He scooped it up and gently put it in his pocket, as he was asking if he could also keep the one from the pair we were trying on. Next, he noticed a security tag on the left shoe that was kept on by a tack. He became fixated on the tag and kept asking if we could also keep this tag and completely forgot about the fact that we were in a store to try on shoes! I kept finding myself reminding him to focus on the shoes so we could find a comfortable pair and get out of the store. Of course at that point he fell in love with pair #32 and I don't think it mattered if they were 10 sizes too big and hot pink he would have bought them regardless!

Okay, so here is the other piece of this. My son knows how to charm the pants off of anyone. Ever since he's been about 6 months old - he figured out how to bat his eyelashes, coo and giggle at everyone. People would stop me all the time to tell me how cute he was and how alert and smart he seemed. The older he got, the more he thrived on the attention and the more he "improved his game." I never noticed how much attention he received, but all of a sudden we realized our son could charm his way across the Khyber Pass. Before I knew it, he was getting people he didn't know to give him things, always telling him how smart he was, handsome he was, cutest boy in the world, etc. etc... So now here we were in the shoe store with this young woman telling my son how he was the cutest little boy she had ever met and how would he like a sticker. As he charmed her, I realized she was giving him 10 stickers because there just wasn't a little boy any cuter than this one! Another day, another win for my son...