act your age, not your shoe size

so we pretty much live out in the sticks. we've got our wal-mart and our home depot and an entire antique shopping district but as far as "real" shopping goes, well, we've got to drive all the way in to san antonio.

and as we do, we pass by the evil "bass pro shops" empire.

now, i'm not saying there's anything intrinsically "wrong" with bass pro shops ... i don't want to get their CEO all riled up or anything ... it's just that being married to the guy i'm married to we rarely pass BY the bass pro shops where we don't GO IN TO the bass pro shops.

and that's just not my kind of shopping.

camouflage bedding.

beef jerky.

fishing boats.

turkey jerky.

guns.

alligator jerky.

did i mention that this bass pro shops it's absolutely HUGE? and that they carry jerky?

which means i can lose john in about 10 seconds flat only to find him 2 hours later caressing a 12 foot long smoker/grill you can actually hook up to a trailer hitch and cart around town. now that's what i call "meals on wheels".

it's enough to make me curl up underneath the stuffed elk and cry. you know the stuffed elk over by the indoor fish pond stocked with thousand pound catfish that terrify my 4 year old. actually, i find them kinda scary too. what kind of mutant fish has whiskers?

you may have seen us going in to bass pro shops before. i'm the 43 year old adult splayed out on the million degree asphalt kicking and screaming. that tantrum-throwing adult? yep, that's me.

but 11 year old daughter and i discovered a little somethin' somethin' way up on the second floor the other day, right behind the "bow hunting" department.

they carry women's shoes ....

and not just the hip-wader-slogging-through-the-swamp-frog-gigging kind of shoes but REAL shoes. girly shoes.

you know, the kind where your toenails show.

so daughter and i proceeded to go to town trying on shoes while john and "his" son were downstairs, lost somewhere in the bait aisle.

and that's when i realized my daughter, my precious little 11 year old daughter, has surpassed me in shoe size.

in fact, nothing in the bass pro shops inventory fit her.

yep, she's already a size 11+.

so we went toe-to-toe and it appears her big toe, the boss of all the other toes, is the culprit.

he's huge.

he's the goliath of big toes in the big toe world.

even in a pair of flip flops* her big toe hangs over the edge like a cliff diver eyeing the rocks below.

*sidebar: we used to call these "thongs" but daughter informs me that today's proper use of the word "thong" implies fabric being crammed up your fanny crack and therefore it's not appropriate to announce in the middle of the bass pro shop shoe department that we're intersted in TRYING ON THOSE THONGS. which, of course, give me license to stand there saying "thongs thongs thongs thongs" over and over again thereby driving 11 year old daughter in to a pre-teen humiliated frenzy.

now, i have to admit, my first unspoken thought as we're standing in the bass pro shop shoe department was "oh dang, she's outgrown everything i'm going to be able to buy off the rack ... she's going to require custom-made italian shoes for everything ..."

and then i was overcome with the "she's only 11 ... how BIG ARE HER FEET GOING TO BE?"

and then i looked over and realize this sweet little 11 year old girl also understood the unspoken - all the cute shoes she sees in nordstrom and macy's and neiman marcus and sometimes target aren't going to fit her.

and she's sad.

but in a flash of brilliance she looks at me with a little grin and says this:

"at least when someone tells me to 'act my age, not my shoe size' i can tell them I AM .... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahha"

and she cracks herself up.

and i'm relieved 'cause she's let me off the hook ... i don't have to justify marrying and procreating with a 6'7" man who is the carrier of the "huge foot" gene.

and i don't have to pull something out of my "mommy bag of tricks" to make her feel better about her giant feet.

she just figured it out all by herself ... her feet are what her feet are ... nothing we can do about how big they are or how big they might be so we might as well have a good laugh along the way.

last night we were "chatting" about the completion (or lack thereof) of her household chores and she looked at me, serious as can be, and told me to "stop messing with the sasquatch" ...

sasquatch? did she just call herself a sasquatch?

"awesome!" i told her. "that's one less halloween costume i have to figure out!"

and so it goes ...