Sole Mates

My kids have a thing for shoes.
Of course, one might expect that from an artsy girl like Hillary.
But don't be fooled...boys care about what's on their feet too.  Parker has found a website where he can design his own shoe.  He's spent hours tweaking his dream tennis shoe...changing background colors...adding a star here and a stripe there...putting his name and basketball number on the side... then  mimimizing it and threatening the rest of us with bodily harm if we close it out before he is able to save up enough to order them.  Even if that takes weeks...months...YEARS...

And I just let him dream.
But his sister had other plans.  A few weeks before his birthday, she secretly went on the website and ordered his "perfect" shoes...with her own hard-earned money.  She waited giddily for the mail each day, afraid he would guess what was up if he saw a box delivered with that company's name on the label.
She shouldn't have worried.
When they came, he was clueless.
"Mom," he yelled from the other room.  "Hillary got a package."
And that was that.
She squirreled them off to her room where she wrapped them in black and gold paper (our school colors), and hid the bag because his birthday was still a week away.
Later when Dad and I got home from running errands, we were met with a beaming new-shoe-wearing Parker!  "Look what Hillary got me!" he exclaimed.  And she was beaming too.  "I couldn't wait." she said sheepishly, "So I just went ahead and gave them to him."
He was happy.
She was happy.
I was happy.  Because as much as they fight...get on one another's nerves...roll eyes and call names...it's good to know that deep down they really are sole mates!