…and so, after four interesting years, the tradition has finally evolved from learning to ride the bike every year to riding to school together (and soon…family rides!).
I like to mentally file memories as a little trick to try to improve my memory in general. An example would be my Words I Never Thought I Would Utter file, whose contents include such gems as “stop using your brother as a weapon”, “can we limit the chicken noises for today?”, and “no, we are not adding sharks…it’s a fire pit.”
Today’s bicycle adventure will be added to the The Things We Do for Our Children file. After only a few days of consistent riding (even though we did, in fact, start from square one again this year…beginning with the claim of never having ridden before…learning proved to be much faster this time) Little Man decided he really and truly wanted to ride his bike to school this morning. It is about a 2 mile ride, if you ride the back way through the neighborhoods to avoid main roads, and we have ridden it many times before with Little Man firmly attached to my bicycle on a piggy back bike. Of course, this morning proved to be the coldest morning we have had in the past few weeks at a little over 40 degrees F, but I did not by any means want to discourage the progress he has made. So, after digging out a pair of gloves for him to wear, removing the piggy back bike from mine, fastening his helmet on, and explaining why it would be very difficult for him to meet Paul Rudd for lunch one of these days, and why I do not, in fact, have Mr. Rudd’s number to give him a call to ask (you really have to be on your toes, and ready for many a twist and turn when engaging Little Man in any sort of conversation), we were off!
You may have noticed that I wrote “digging out a pair of gloves for him to wear”… As happens more often than not with the kids, I got him all set and neglected to apply the same logic to myself. We rode together in the frigid wind and despite a few stops here and there and a couple moments of anxiety (on MY part, mind you) we made it all the way to the school. The smile of pride on Little Man’s face as he dismounted his bicycle (which I had lovingly named Moby Bike…Little Man’s white whale) and told his friends that he had ridden all the way from home, was well worth what is probably the closest I have ever come to frost bite this late in April. And, when he earnestly asked if we had done the ride in record time, I smiled and very honestly answered, “yes!” Of course, I did not feel the need to mention which end of the record scale we were on (fastest v slowest). Now…let’s just hope it warms up before it is time to bike back over to ride home with him!
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