I can’t wait for the day all four of us can go for a long bike ride together. It’s one of my parenting fantasies.
We were at Westboro beach last summer and there they were …the Biking Family: mom, dad, brother, sister, all sitting on that special part of the beach where the grass meets the sand. They ate their lunches, feet in the sand, gazing out into the water. Dad consulted a map and outlined their route out loud while the kids thoughtfully munched on their granola bars.
Ok, I’m not sure if they actually had granola bars, but they probably did. It was a very sweet little scene. “We are going to do that someday, “ I thought.
This place is perfect for biking. The Ottawa River is just a dozen blocks away, and with it come the bike paths that stretch up and down and around. These aren’t ordinary city paths. [Here’s a map!] You make your way along winding paths surrounded by trees, away from motorized traffic, with the river flanking you the entire time. Is it my imagination or is the air cleaner here? In pre-child days I often biked westward to Britannia Beach (also a neat spot), and once went across the bridge to Quebec and eastward to the Museum of Civilization. Ottawa is great for that kind of stuff. It’s the Ottawa that cannot be seen through the window of a car. You need to be on a bike to do it. There is something so liberating about biking. You ride. You stop. You sit. You watch. You absorb. And when you finally feel like moving again you hop back on again only to repeat, repeat, repeat.
I think we have a while to go before the fantasy becomes a reality. The girls are not quite there yet. At the end of last summer both girls were biking without training wheels. But I didn’t know who to worry about more: Sarah, who was a little over four with “go get ’em” attitude or Emma, who was just over six and who was (and is) more sensitive and likely to give up.
Just as they were getting good it came time to put the bikes away for winter. Now that most of the snow is gone we have dragged them out of the garage, and much to my amazement I discovered that what they say is wrong: you CAN forget how to ride a bike. It was like that last month of summer never happened. Once again, Mark and I found ourselves running alongside them as they wobbled and swerved down the road.
It was evident Sarah needed a new bike. The hand-me down suddenly became much too small for her. Yesterday we went to our neighborhood bike shop. And we saw this.
Once she sat on it she didn’t want to give it up. Not in a bad way, there were no tears, but she had obviously fallen in love.
We all went back last night to have a second look. I knew that in her mind she had settled on the pink version of that bike, but there was also blue, red, and a very cool orange. She pointed out that the bike also came with a sheet of decals, and that she could further decorate her bike with daisies and cute bugs (there are already purple ladybugs on the seat and frame). The decals sealed the deal. She wouldn’t budge from the pink bike, which was fine. I personally would have preferred the red or orange, and so I took a closer look at those.
Both of them were pre-decorated like Sarah’s pink bike. I think the red bike had traffic decals and the orange had trucks, or was it vice versa, anyway, the decals they came with were definitely boyish. I couldn’t believe it. That meant most girls were limited to the pink bike and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get the other coloured bikes. I mentioned this to the owner of the store. How come, out of four bikes, only one was the “girls” bike (gah, so typically PINK, or “rose” as they call it on their website) and other three choices were decorated for boys? Why couldn’t the three other colours (red, blue and orange) be gender neutral? Why couldn’t the manufacturer just pre-decorate the bikes with racing stripes or whatever and include separate sheets of decals for each kid, no matter their gender, to decorate the bikes how he or she wanted? eg. some sheets with trucks and tires and others with strawberries and rainbows or monkeys and lightning bolts. ANYTHING.
Isn’t that ridiculous?
Anyway, yes, so we have a new pink bike, but not quite yet. It won’t be ready until Saturday. Until then she’ll have to make do with her scooter.
The other thing she’d like are roller skates. I wonder if we can just get them in black?
