Where the devil are my shoes?

My youngest child thought it would be fun to wear my brown flats across the kitchen, so he could hear the clop-clop-clop sound they make as they fall off his foot to bang on the laminate flooring.

"How can you stand all this noise?" he gleefully shrieks, as he proceeds to bang around my kitchen. "Do you just walk like this to keep them quiet?" as he shuffles forward like you would slide a pair of mule slippers to keep them from falling off.

He spends several more minutes sliding and clopping and tripping around, delighting in my plain brown shoes, and it would all be much cuter and sweeter if I had any idea where said shoes ended up when he finally tired of them!

My shoes (and slippers) tend to get strewn around the house, one shoe upstairs in the bathroom, the other shoe downstairs hidden under a couch. This despite the fact that I took them off when I came in and put them neatly on the stairs to go up.

Searching for my shoes reminds me of something I used to do when I was little. When my mother picked me up at my sitter's after work, I would try to prolong my stay by hiding my shoes under the couch. If I delayed long enough, I thought I could stay for dinner instead of going home.

The babysitting family was a large one, with a stay-at-home mom who was a WONDERFUL cook. She would start cooking at 5pm, an hour before I had to go home. My mother, in contrast, was a competent cook, but not into variety or seasonings.

Alas for my plans to grub a free dinner, my babysitters figured out my scheme, and made sure my shoes were by the front door for pickup. Darn! And now my 7-year old is hiding my shoes. Must be karma...