Slip-Proof Your Baby’s Socks and Slippers

We have a bit of a sock/slipper obsession in my family. For Christmas, birthdays, and any holiday that produces ridiculous holiday-themed socks, everyone gets a pair; the first gift to new babies  in the family tends to be a pair of adorable little teeny-tiny socks or booties. One of my favorite gifts for Forrest was a pair of argyle BYU socks my sister bought for him. The nurses at the hospital loved them: “Where did you find baby knee socks?!” (They were really just 6+ month socks, but we weren’t going to waste 6 precious months before beginning to brainwash him to embed a deep love for cozy footwear and BYU.)

Moral of the long intro: we have a deep appreciation for warm feet around here. My dad gave Forrest a cute, goofy little pair of reindeer slippers for Christmas, and as soon as they were opened, he was tearing around the house with warm reindeer feet. But his new slippers didn’t have the little slip-proof grippies on the bottom, so he was face-planting on the hardwood floor every few steps. Which, unfortunately, failed to teach him the important life lesson that just walking at a normal pace is a better idea, especially when you’re only 1 and your complete lack of balance results in a flying head-first dive into the refrigerator door (that may have happened just this morning).

(Just in case anyone is wondering, the answer is no, I do not allow my child to play with prescription drugs [very often]. That bottle is filled with bobby pins. Nice little storage solution, by the way, and he loves carrying it around and shaking it!)

So I Macguyver-ed a DIY slipper gripper solution:

Hot glue dots across the bottom of the slippers turn them into safe little grippy soles! It’s not the prettiest, especially if you don’t care at all what the bottom of a slipper looks like so you put zero effort into glue-saliva-string prevention, but it gets the job done. Now he can race around like a ninny without tipping over more than the usual amount (which, granted, is still quite a bit).

You can also use puff paints or tacky glue to place little dots or lines along the bottom of socks and slippers—they stay stickier after they’ve dried, so you get a little more gripping power than you do with hot glue, but I didn’t have any, and the hot glue seems to be doing a pretty nice job! We’ve lost a few glue dots in the weeks since Christmas, but they’re still so much grippier than the slippers alone were.

Viva baby socks!