Painted Sneaks

Whew! What a week, huh guys? I’ve been staying away from social media and focusing all my nervous energy on doing things like swapping out our kitchen cabinet pulls with knobs, a very spontaneous decision, and letting the girls paint their new kicks.

They both started complaining last week, while wearing their old sneakers, that their feet hurt. Maybe it was because, when I checked out the situation, their toes were stuffed into their now-too-small sneaks and needed a tad more space. (Seriously? Didn’t I just buy those yesterday?!) So, to Walmart we went where we grabbed the same sneakers as the ones they had that had lasted us several months. You can’t beat the price at $5.67 each and really, they hold up so well! I really loved these tennies too but they didn’t have them in the girls size at the store and I didn’t feel like waiting for them to be shipped so we went another route – plain white with a project in mind.

I had to push my fear of messes aside to set out all of my (very permanent) paints so that the girls could get their customization on.

First, I removed all of the shoelaces.
(And speaking of the shoelaces, the girls don’t know how to tie their laces yet so I’m thinking about grabbing some of these laces! They look so cool and would make getting out the door without having to bend over (twice) so much easier!)

Then I stuffed the insides of the shoes with plastic bags so that paint didn’t get inside and also because they kept the sides from collapsing in while the girls painted.

I wrote in this instagram that I let the girls “go to town” on their new shoes and maybe that was a little misleading because I didn’t just hand over the paint and walk away. I did a little bit of what’s called micro-managing. :) Gianna and Sebastian were both sawing logs so I had two free hands to help, clean-up, whatever. Part of that micro-mamaging was only letting them do one color at a time. They wanted “rainbow” shoes and we’re still working on the concept of color-combining. They have a hard time understanding how you get brown when you mix ALL the colors instead of rainbow…

I asked them to try not to get paint on the rubber soles. I knew that the paint would end up peeling off of the rubber and so I just figured we could skip that part. They did pretty good staying off the rubber and the little bits that they did paint, I could scratch right off.

I also told them that they could paint them however they wanted – stripes, polka dots, zebra, whatever. And I told them that they could paint them differently than their sister was. Haha! They tend to start coloring differently and then, once they see how their sister is handling the crayon, they do the same. I wanted their shoes to be totally different 1) because I was interested to see what each’s idea of painted shoes looked like and 2) so I could tell whose was whose without asking (even though I did mark their initials on the bottom soles just to be safe…not that they can’t share shoes but more so they won’t forget which they painted and fight over them Surprised smile ).

I thought about grabbing some NeverWet to spray them with so they’d stay cleaner longer but I haven’t had a chance to grab some. By the time I do, their little feet will probably be begging for the next size up and since this paint-fest went so well, we might have to repeat it later.