My kid will be celebrating her birthday next month. So its time for us to get all her clothes shoes accessories and gifts ready till next month. Today's generation gets everything they like on their birthdays not just new clothes like we used to have during our time.

We decided that her birthday should be a family affair this time....the extended family....with grandparents, uncles aunt etc. She is still small to crib for a party with friends. Last year we had a party with all her friends and their family. So this year is a break for us.

We decided to get all the things she likes. Her room will be decorated with Hello Kitty decals. Hello Kitty is her fav character. Ceiling will have the glowing stars and planets. Bed sheets and pillow covers will be with Disney princesses. She will get to wear a Hello Kitty digital watch and bedside Hello Kitty clock. Well hope all this compensates for the friends party.

Now for the family party...she has a new dress and accessories from USA. Shoes! they are worn out. She was brought up in USA for 3 years so she has always had Disney or Nick shoes. Now in India where do we look for it!

We started with the local shops in small malls. All the stock they have are duplicate china ka maal. Sill we decided to explore. They had the Dora shoes but not with good padding. One pair had Dora written on it with a princess picture....mismatch! Aajkal ka kids don't understand they think. Barbie shoes were with the name Babi. Well my kid cannot still read but the first look of it seems so cheap. Well these shoes still sell for Rs 400. One store had the Barbie XOXO shoes but the color and style was not appealing.

We also looked for fancy shoes/sandals. My kid is not used to wearing sandals so she needed good ankle support ones. Since she will wear it only for a few hrs and few days we thought of getting it from local shops instead of spending 1000s for such shoes.

Finally she started feeling sleepy. So we decided to leave her home and go to a bigger mall. We looked in Shoppers Stop. They sell brands like Kittens and Kidsville. Again no princess shoes!

Next we looked in the retail mall store. Again they had the XOXO shoes with additional Rs 100 mall charges. They also had Garfield and Tweety shoes. Well this was something new but we were sure that it will not be appealing for our kid.

Finally we went to Lifestyle which had a good huge range of shoes. We found Barbie, Dora, Tweety and Hannah Montana shoes here. Well these sell for around Rs 1000 but the shoes are very comfortable. They also sell fancy shoes of brands Ginger and Kidsville. They had a ballet pair for Rs 500. Our shoe problem was finally getting solved. We found both Barbie and the fancy shoes.


The next problem was that our kid was not with us there. So how do we decide on the size. She had the Tinkerbell shoes from USA which had the EUR and US size mentioned on it. So we had to call home and get the size. We went ahead and got the next size shoes. Phew!