first things first. i did not buy the preschoolian shoes that you see adorning odin’s feet; rather jeffrey silverman ( “founder, ceo and customer experience specialist” ) contacted me offering to send me a free pair if i agreed to write about the experience. well, of course, i’m not going to turn down a free pair of shoes as long as i have complete freedom to write whatever i want – the good, along with the bad and the ugly ( that’s right would be senders of free stuff! i’ll more than happily write about your stuff as long as i can maintain some semblance of editorial freedom and properly disclose how the good were got ).

i didn’t know too much about preschoolian shoes before the offer, but i’ll certainly take a closer look at anything that has been received a time magazine coolest invention award produced by a company whose founder has a blog. and they certainly have more than a few satisfied customers.

but alas, when we tried on the shoes we ordered we discovered that they were too big! the irony being that there’s a lot of information on the site about how to ensure a proper fit. this is entirely my fault as i measured odin’s foot at 3.75″ ( a preeschoolian size 17 ), but rounded the measurement to 4″ ( a preeschoolian size 18 ) and then, for reasons unknown asked jeff to send me a size 19 or 20 because “by the time we get the shoes they should fit just fine”. apparently i was assuming odin’s feet were going to grow 0.75″ in a few weeks.

so, as you can see from the unique visu fit system, you can’t see any of odin’s little toes through the clear panel which means that they’re far too large.

sigh.

quite unintentionally, i’ve given myself the opportunity to highlight preschoolian’s outstanding guarantee, which gives dolts like me the freedom to recover from our mistakes:

“Shop with confidence — returns and exchanges are free! What’s more, if you exchange your order, we send out the new ones before the old ones come back — we use the honor system, as we value your time and business. “

how about that! a company that trusts you! what a novel concept.

even though they do trust me, i’m not going to hassle them with an exchange due to my incompetence. we’ll keep the pair that they sent and wait for odin’s feet to grow a little larger so we can do a proper review.

because odin isn’t really walking ( or crawling for that matter ), we opted for the “cover my foot” super soft moccasin which is for indoor use only.

hopefully you don’t have to ask why we ordered the pair with dogs sewn on the top.