Pages

9.21.2011

Feet! Shoes! Germs!

I do not like feet!  I never have.  The gross me out!  Thank goodness my husband's feet are ok (for feet at least).  They are better than mine, ha!

But I have this thing...with feet...and with germs.  Shoes.  Think where your shoes go.  I can't even say all the places your shoes go because quite frankly, it just grosses me out!

I have for a very long time, very much enjoyed the tradition in a lot of European and Asian cultures, of removing your shoes when you enter a home.  I LOVE this idea.  It keeps yucky germs OUT of the house that you work so hard at keeping "clean" so often!

Sean and I take our shoes off in our house.  The only time our shoes make the trek through the house is if we are going from the front door to the back, or the shoes we want to wear are in the back closet and not by the door where we last took them off.  But that's not really ok either!

How do you tell guests when they come over to please take off their shoes?!  My mother, for one, hates to be barefoot!  My sister-in-law is Russian, and when we have get-togethers at their house, we take off our shoes and kindly put on a pair of slippers.  They have a ton of extras and provide them for whoever wishes to wear some!    It is just custom and it's what we expect.  They don't even wear them from one door to another!  AND...here is the real kicker...if they leave, and then have to run back in b/c they forgot something...you guessed it...the shoes come OFF before running back through the house!  I should ask my sis-n-law if she would even do this with hard to get on and off winter boots?!  Hmm..

How do I enforce this in our house?!  Shoes are SO GROSS!  And I just cringe at the thought of having a baby crawling around on these floors with all the yucky shoe germs on them!

Do I need germ therapy?!  

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I suggest you get them all some slippers to wear. We all take our shoes off at the door and then we put our slippers on. For those who don't know about our no shoes rule, we politely ask them to remove their shoes. Family and friends tend to bring slippers with them or just go around without shoes. To me it seems perfectly normal and acceptable not to allow shoes in the house. Aside from the obvious dirt factor it's simply more comfortable to go barefoot and/or wear slippers.