You have feet in your shoes. You just have the wrong feet in those shoes.

My three year old, Knox cannot put his shoes on the right feet if his life depended on it. In fact, I'd say that 80% of the time he puts them on the wrong feet. You'd think that at least half the time he'd get it right but I swear it's like he taught himself to  put them on backwards.

Now considering I have three kids ages 5 and under, a kid that can put his shoes on the wrong feet is better than a kid who's shoes I have to put on for him. Right? But eventually I started to worry that he might go to college with his shoes on the wrong feet and it would be ALL MY FAULT. Oh, the drama. The years of therapy he'd need to overcome this. It was time.

With Dash, I cut stickers in half and put a piece in each shoe. It created a sort of puzzle he could put together. If the picture was whole, he had his shoes on the right feet. The only problem was the picture wore off the sticker in a matter of weeks and you were just left with a sticky residue. Yuck.

So I've been pondering an alternative method for a few weeks now and then suddenly, I had a brief moment of genius. I whipped out a Sharpie and wrote half the letters of his name in one shoe and half in the other. Now at three years old, he can't read, but he can recognize his name and at the very least he knows what letter his name starts with.

Let me tell you, this has been a game changer. In just a few weeks, he's started putting his shoes on the right feet 95% of the time. He really likes looking at his name in his shoes and can immediately identify if it's wrong. Additionally, instead of my constant reminding that he needs to switch his shoes, I can just asked him if he checked his name before he put them on.

Will the magic last? Only time will tell. For now, I'm really enjoying having two kids who can put their shoes on the right feet all by themselves.