It’s Shark Week 2019, ya’ll! This year, Discovery Channel is offering programming to teach you more about megalodons (July 28th, 8pm EST), deep-sea mega sharks (July 29th, 9pm EST), suits to make divers invisible to the senses of great whites (August 2nd, 9pm EST), and much, much more.

Of course, sharks aren’t just cool seven days a year. So how do you flaunt your love for Selachimorpha chondrichthyes in the 51 weeks between Shark Weeks?

Build-A-Bear Workshop and Vans can help with that.

Both companies were kind enough to send this Roarbots some samples for review.

The Shark Week Build-a-Bears are absolutely adorable. They are also of a size to give you plenty of bang for your sharks teeth:

Full-grown dubious cat for scale (Photo by S.W. Sondheimer)

My son is in that intermediate phase between young love of stuffed animals and adult “I don’t care what you think; this is cute and I want it” stage so he declined to claim a member of the school. My daughter, however, was immediately transported to deep-sea heaven, a red-and-blue-clad friend taking up a prized position in her bed, while the orange-and-blue-clad model was elected to come to work with me.

These guys are soft and perfectly squishy; the fins are flexible enough for my daughter to sleep with and not wake herself up with a poke from a sharp appendage but still stuff enough to run behind the couch while replicating the Jaws theme song (as you can tell, my husband and I are super mature). 

Speaking of mature, the dude I brought into work was immediately passed around, especially by the new folks in the office who had been subjected to three extremely complex chemistry lectures, and he was found to be a great support tool. We may have gone online to see that there is also a whale shark model and that one could buy plush shark flip flops and/or a surf board. And a Hawaiian shirt. Some of us may have plans to make orders that are not for our children. Possibly.

The girl child is also super enamored of her Vans. She says her favorite thing about them is the bottoms because “It looks like there are sharks swimming around in them.”

Kid NOT included with purchase of sneakers (Photo by S.W. Sondheimer)

She also says they’re comfortable, though she highly recommends socks because they pinched in the toes without them.

These kicks do run a bit on the small side, though I’ve found that to be true of Vans in general; I’d recommend ordering half a size to a size up, especially since kids’ feet grow fast and if you want them to wear these for more than two seconds, you’ll want to give them a little room to grow into them. Yes, that may mean a higher than usual incidence of tripping as they get used to extra room at the front end. You should see me in my new flip flops…

There are several other shoe styles available from Vans, as well as sunglasses from Knockaround and summer gear from vineyard vines. Head-to-toe sharks – as well as accessories – means you can celebrate your favorite critters whenever and wherever you want.

But hey, it’s still the sharkiest week of the year!