Supply and Demand

     Aston has made a request for the commencement of his academic life.  He would like to spend his first year of school in a pair of sneakers that bear the images of the Mario brothers.  With the two July Jones birthday parties behind me I decided there was no time like the present to go online and find these probably hideously ugly shoes. Hey, they are his feet not mine and he'll only be five once. Can you believe I could only find two pair of sneakers with Mario's mug on them!?!  Both pair were lace up, one only came in adult sizes, and the other was eighty dollars. Fail.  Fail.  Fail.  When I gushed, "Of course you can have Super Mario Brothers sneakers for kindergarten Sweetheart, if that will make you happy", I imagined myself popping into a Walmart or Target or Payless or Sears and sorting through an endless sea of crappy velcro sneakers with every fictional character known to man clinging to the side of each shoe and victoriously fishing out a twinkling pair of size elevens with Mario AND Luigi on them making my beloved boy's heart melt for thirty bucks or less.  My internet research, which I'll admit was rushed because Dorothy can now reach my keyboard and is on a mission to crash my computer, gave me Spiderman, The Avengers, Batman, Cars, Phineas and Ferb, and one pair of Transformers sneakers in an infant's size 4 to choose from.  The latter really got to me.  If you can't come up with something sweeter to decorate your infant son's feet with than Megatron, please, I beg you, let him go barefoot.  A second search added Spongebob to the list of choices.  My new plan is to take the young lad to a shoe store and let him pick from shoes that actually exist rather than ones he dreamed up.  It will be fine but I can't help wishing I could have made his dream come true.