Checkmate

I am so tired of Hunter bulldozing through his pairs of shoes. He barely ever ties the laces so they all get shredded at the ends. He always wears them without putting his foot all the way through so the heel goes flat. Basically he is very hard on his shoes. They constantly need replacement in a majorly bad way. When I saw that he had worn a hole in the bottom of one with a month of school left to go, I told him he would have to make due with them. With only a few weeks of school left, I didn't want to buy him a new pair for him to destroy. I like to buy them new shoes when school starts in the fall. Secretly I have been dying to trash them and get him new ones, but planned to wait. Today he came home from school and I noticed him pulling a yellow paper out of his shoe. It was falling apart and all wilted from his sweaty foot. I asked him why he had put a piece of paper inside his shoe. He said because of the hole in the bottom of his shoe, his foot was getting burned on the sidewalk. He went to the nurse and was given a piece of paper to protect his foot from the burning hot pavement as well as some duck tape to add another protective layer to the bottom. 

He called my bluff and now has some new to us shoes (I begged some off my sister that her boy had just grown out of) to wear to school for the last few weeks and to get us through all our camping adventures this summer. Hunter is the only one of my boys that wears shoes to pieces constantly. I'm not sure why he is so rough on them. I used to be able to save shoes and hand them down to the next boy. None of Hunter's shoes have survived to make it to Adam (with the exception of church shoes). I think it's safe to say we got every last penny out of these shoes.