These are the shoes that I first picked out for my baby girl, Emmy. I was so excited to have another baby and couldn’t wait to put her sweet little toes into these cute shoes. I pictured her walking around the playground, climbing up the steps to the slide, with these precious flowered shoes on her feet. I bought these shoes and put them in her drawer, waiting to embrace the day she took her first steps.

Well, she never wore them. They are still brand new.

THESE were her first shoes. I’m not joking. A far cry from cute, eh?

Our first Physical Therapist (who was wonderful) determined that Emmy has low muscle tone and needed a more supportive shoe. She asked me to find some shoes at a thrift store which she was going to cut up (gulp). I scoured a thrift shop, using her specific instructions, and presented her with the cutest pink shoes I could find that still met her criteria. I was hanging onto the notion that Emmy’s first shoes would be sweet and girly. That’s when our Physical Therapist grabbed a scissor and started hacking away. She cut off the fronts of the shoes and then sewed on black straps, which were intended to hold Emmy’s foot tightly in place. She then glued padding to the inside.

Emmy wore those shoes for about a month, and I grimaced every time I saw them. I longed for the first pair that I picked out that were still sitting in her drawer, brand new.

These are the shoes that Emmy wore after the frightful pair. She needed more support on the side of her foot, so we graduated to these white shoes. They say “My Baptism” on the side. I think most children wear their baptism shoes only once, but Emmy wore hers for months, which made people chuckle.

I had a woman stop me in a store, point to Emmy’s shoes, and say, “Oh, I remember when we all had to wear those ugly first walkers!”

What she probably didn’t realize is that nobody wears ugly first walkers anymore. Most baby shoes are blinged out. She didn’t realize that I didn’t have a choice in the matter, and there were very cute shoes sitting at home in a drawer, brand new.

The next step was to move Emmy into orthotics, which are braces that go inside shoes to help stabilize the foot. When this idea was first brought up to me, I thought, “NO WAY.” I pictured unsightly braces up to her knee. In fact, one of our therapists has a brother who wore clunky metal orthotics when he was younger.

But it isn’t about me. It’s about what’s best for Emmy. So we got her fitted for orthotics, which are much prettier and smaller than I imagined. You can barely tell that she’s wearing them, and she’s very comfortable in them.

These are the first shoes Emmy wore with her orthotics. She loved to pull open the velcro strap on the top.

And, in the end, she didn’t care what her shoes looked like. She just liked walking around; getting into everything. Through all of the shoe changes, she didn’t blink once. She just wanted to get up and go.

She has no idea that I still look at those first pair of shoes and feel a pang of regret, a pang that she didn’t get to experience her first years as typical children do. Or maybe it’s my own experience I’m thinking about–the regret that I didn’t get to put those cute shoes on my baby when I really, really, wanted to.

Sometimes things turn out differently than we planned. I’m a VERY (read: obsessively) good planner, so that’s been a challenge. But what hasn’t been a challenge is looking over at Emmy’s bright, smiling face and knowing that we’re doing what’s best for her. Right now, she doesn’t need cute shoes. She needs support.