Erika - Shoelaces

Marie was laying down for her afternoon nap, and Sarah was in her bedroom tying up the phoneline and chatting up a storm. This left the middle child (well, at least by actual age... sort of) of the Swanson home bored, and with nothing on TV that wasn't too much of a grown-up show for her to like it, she thought she could maybe hang out with her mom for the day.

Instead, though, Veronica was very busy. And, at a loss for much else to do, a box containing shoes recently bought for Erika were shoved her way as her mother headed to get the laundry. A very confused girl, wearing only a T-shirt and her diaper (the preferred outfit when company wasn't expected), was sitting in a chair next to the laundry room holding one of the shoes, absent-mindedly fooling with the strings with one hand.

"Mom--"

"Erika, I've got arms full of laundry here." The woman awkwardly moved the clearly heavy basket to one arm, using the other to open the door in front of her before taking two-handed possession of it once more. "Just practice that rhyme I gave you while I get back to work."

She headed into the room in question then, her foot nudging the door shut behind her. It wasn't that Erika never learned how to tie her shoes, it was just that ever since that fateful Friday she had no clue how to do it. She remembered that there were supposed to be two pretty bows on her shoes which made her an eensy bit more knowledgeable on that subject than she was on the potty but she was just as clueless otherwise.

"Bunny... Bunny goes round the... Through... the... wait..." It took a moment of though before she could even remember the rhyme. "Bunny goes round the tree, through the hole and... Hold on, where's the tree?" She was awkwardly holding up her shoestrings, staring at them in confusion over this. Wait...

It felt sort of weird to think about this new realization, but a nagging feeling in the back of her mind felt like it was the right one to make...

Some time later after she had finally sorted out the whites and was ready to start them up, Veronica was cut off by the sound of her only still-diapered daughter shouting, "Mom! Mom, come see!"

Sure enough, that was enough to get the mother running. And a second later, she was smiling.

"Mom, look! I put my shoes on all by myself! And they weren't sandles or velcro or anything!"

"Oh sweetie, that's wonderful!" Sure enough, Erika had tied her shoes correctly - even on the right feet, though it looked like her problem of mismatching her socks wasn't quite resolved yet. Still, she clearly deserved a reward for this accomplishment that she'd been trying to pull off for as long as the other Swansons could remember... "Why don't you get a skirt on and we can slip out for some ice cream?"

"Alright!" In a lower voice, she mumbled out, "I can't wait to show Ariel..." Sure, she was still just a baby since she didn't know how to use the mean, shouting diaper for grown-ups called a potty, but just pulling this off made her feel much more grown-up.