Noor & Sol | Spanish Shoes

My content has been a little random lately. Truth is, I haven’t always known what to post.

Then the other day, while clearing out the kids’ shoe cupboard and putting aside all the pairs they’ve outgrown, I looked at them properly.

Scratched. Dirty. Scuffed. Some of them completely wrecked.

And for some reason, it took me back years.

I remembered being on the beach in my hometown when Gonzalo was tiny. He was absolutely covered in sand, probably with a runny nose, drool everywhere, his cap crooked… basically a complete mess. 😂

Right next to us were these perfectly clean children, happily playing without somehow getting a single grain of sand on themselves.

My husband and I looked at each other like… are we doing this wrong? Are we just a bit of a disaster?

But we weren’t.

Our little boy was having the BEST day. And so were we.

On the same beach where my mum took me as a child. Where she had played as a child. And where my grandmother and great-grandmother had played before us.

So I started looking through old photos.

The first one in this carousel was taken during Covid. It had been raining all day and all Gonzalo wanted to do was jump in the puddles.

The photo speaks for itself. But what I remember isn’t the mud, or his wet clothes, or what his shoes looked like afterwards.

I remember his laugh. His excitement. The look on his face.

And suddenly those battered little shoes in the cupboard didn’t look quite so ruined anymore.

They looked like evidence of a childhood well lived.

Buy good shoes. Then let them live in them. 🤍