To shoe or not to shoe…?

We are in the same situation as pretty much every other penniless parent at the moment, unpaid maternity leave is not fun, I remember the first month I stopped being paid it came as a massive shock that the bank still demanded payment of my mortgage!  RUDE!!!  I may be back at work but the deficit is still felt, we now manage on only my income and the lack of funds is one of the reasons the rennovation of the

Anyway I’ve been investigating other ways of making money (successful ways – ie not playing the lottery) and one of the things I have had some success with is selling unwanted things on eBay.  What things you may well ask?  It started with unwanted building materials, things we had bought in error and not been able to return, then I started hunting round for things we don’t use but have had for ages.  Then I expanded it to my wardrobe (1 year rule…not easy to apply strictly when you’ve been pregnant or recovering from being pregnant for over 18 months).  This worked well…but I became addicted, what else could I sell?

Whilst putting up our wardrobe (Freecycle – thank you again!) and debating whether to buy shoe racks from Ikea the answer became clear…I must part with some of my shoe collection.

NNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOo

Now I’m not obsessed with shoes, I just like them and at 5ft tall finding clothes that fit and suit me is difficult, but let me tell you there’s always a bargain pair of size 3s in every shoe shop sale.  Yes my son’s wardrobe is full of my shoes in boxes, but they’re all “pre-pregnancy shoes” so I can’t wear them.  Cue confused look from the Turk “why can’t you wear pre-pregnancy shoes – your feet didn’t change”.

This is true, they didn’t, but pre-pregnancy I was a 4 inch heel girl, I managed to maintain this through a good few months of pregnancy but eventually just couldn’t take the judgmental looks from other tube passengers when I asked for their seat to rest my pregnancy weary feet…clad in heels.  Eventually I broke and resorted to a smaller chunky heel…then flats.

Pregnancy has completely changed my shoe life, quite recently on a trip to buy a new sleeping bag for Jem I bought 3 pairs of flat shoes – see, I’m growing as a person rather then just wearing heels!

I always thought that post-pregnancy I would simply slip straight back into my heels, but I seem to be broken…they make my feet hurt; they make my knees hurt; I can’t walk properly, in fact it’s not so much walking as staggering (although give me a buggy to hold onto and walking is significantly easier).  What to do?  Well the answer is staring me in the face, so here I go, my finest 2 pairs of heels have already been dispatched to their new owners and all I have left are the photos to remind me…sniff sniff.

Note to self:  In future head directly to the handbag section of TK Maxx rather than shoes.  Can’t grow out of a handbag 🙂