Growing up, and belated photos

Look! Old bad phone photos from our beach trip in August.

Duchess got braces this week. This is her before they were installed.

No post-braces close-up photo yet. Duchess headed straight off to her camping weekend after school on Friday. This is her at the bus stop, snarfing a hastily-assembled burrito, and rocking an overall awesome adolescent geekery. She's now a good inch taller than I am.





















And this is a random photo from my bike commute last week, waiting for the drawbridge to go down.

Tips for the Fat Lazy Bike Commuter

Now that I've been bike commuting an 8-mile round trip almost every day for a few months now, I feel qualified to make some recommendations to others like me, who are neither fit nor fearless. Here is what I have learned.
1) Wear clothes that wick, especially for your underlayers. I'm usually a natural fibers sort of person, and I do not perform any activities that have led me to think that I might need "technical" underpants. I guarantee that nobody in Patagonia's design or marketing departments has me in mind as they do their work. However, I have learned that sitting around all day in sweaty clothing is crummy, and apparently "technical" means "hey, your clothes don't have to STAY sweaty!" So unless you're bringing a complete change of clothes, I highly recommend some nice synthetic wicking fibers.
2) Find a good place to change. I do not recommend my own changing spot, a humid, stuffy public restroom where homeless people also go to change. Ventilation would be nice.
3) Take it slow. Stop for pedestrians. Chat with other slow bicyclists and pedestrians. (You're going too slow to chat with anybody else.) Notice the scenery. Is that a bird singing? Isn't this nice?
4) Wear antiperspirant, even though it's a little disturbing, and definitely doesn't go with your philosophy about what people should put on their skin. I am already continually in danger of violating of cubicle-world etiquette because I have a very hard time not blurting out whatever I think to the person who happens to be nearest me, and I do not need to give my cubicle neighbors another reason to request a seating re-assignment.
5) Wear your boots. They're still the best.

Boasting, or contentment. Maybe both.

This evening, Cook had a meeting/hanging-out session with one of the groups he volunteers with. I took this as an excuse to go out for dinner with the girls. They chose sushi, and they chose to bike there. Skipper has recently grown into a hand-me-down bike that still feels very large and dangerous to her, and she hasn't done much biking on the street, so this was kind of a minor big deal.

These are the things that happened:

1) The weather is absolutely gorgeous - a warm, glowingly sunny evening, with everything in full leaf and/or bloom.

2) When we walked in to the restaurant, a woman whom we've seen working there (and know to be a native Japanese speaker) greeted us in English, and Skipper said, casually and without being prompted, "Konnichiwa," and the woman politely returned her greeting but made no fuss about it, and when we left, Skipper said "Sayonara."

3) The girls liked ALL their food and nobody complained.

4) Duchess said dreamily, in conversation about her day and her future options for living in China, "Mom, I think I'm growing up."

5) All the way home, Skipper told us facts (and "facts"*) about ants.

6) The biking went very smoothly.

So there I was, biking home on a lovely evening with my lovely, safe, healthy children who are growing up, who are interested in many things, who want to know about ants and live in other countries, and we have enough money to go out for sushi sometimes and return to our comfortable, safe home where we have enough food and all the things we need, and everything just felt so idyllic that I felt completely peaceful about everything.

Of course, now I have to put Skipper to bed, so I will probably not feel so idyllic. But I did. I do. I remain very lucky.


*She says some ants eat the blood of cockroaches. While the ants in our house often bite my bare feet, I'm skeptical about the cockroach thing.

Sunday Parkways

Today the girls and I biked part of the Sunday Parkways route - about 3 miles, including uphill and downhill. The roads are closed to auto traffic, so Skipper rode her own bike the whole way. It was awesome.

Halfway through Return of the Jedi...

Duchess's favorite character is Chewbacca.

I have surrendered to summer. Today we stayed at the pool (or at least within the park in which it is located) from 9 to 1:30, so we could enjoy the free open swim period. Then we biked straight over to drop Duchess at her afternoon circus camp, and Skipper and I biked home (I biked, while Skipper napped in an extremely uncomfortable-looking position in the trailer) to hang up swim suits and recuperate with all the blinds closed. She's quietly playing with the babies,* and I am computering. I feel pickled, and faintly grimy, and definitely overdosed in sunshine. I have mosquito bites. I have a pink-nosed husband newly sporting a summer haircut and a summer sunburn.** (He's sunburned because he spends all his leisure time painting the house. I spend mine complaining about the heat.)

I realized today that all of Duchess's summer pursuits are physical. Her brain is resting while her body swims (and swims and swims) and does martial arts and (this week) circuses. I think it's probably a positive thing - she's doing lots of reading, so it's not like she's truly mentally ossifying, and the habit of physical activity is a good one to start early. Math camp can wait a little longer.

It's also worth noting that Skipper, who is suddenly starting to look more like a kid and less like an elderly toddler, is really enjoying swim lessons. She participates with enthusiasm - she smiles, and even laughs during her lessons, which is unheard of. Next week she has a parks and rec preschool camp in the mornings - we'll see how that goes down...


*The babies are the favorite play activity right now - Duchess and Skipper appear to be operating a fairly sketchy orphanage. Yesterday they got ALL the baby and babyish dolls out, and got out lots of pretend food and whatnot so the babies could have a birthday party. Our whole dining room was committed to babies.

** Cook rarely sunburns, preferring instead to turn enviably golden of hair and skin as the season progresses. I met him at the end of a summer in which he had spent a lot of time outside, and it took me probably six months to realize that he was actually light-skinned and brown-haired.

Mudshark

Some of my favorite parenting moments happen when my kids accomplish something in a big, rapid leap, catapulted by a lucky confluence of circumstances There are times (fewer of them after the first two years or so of each kid's life) when Cook and I are able to provide the right object/idea/strategy/whatever at the right time, when that the kid is really ready for it, physically and emotionally. Usually, of course, we don't get the timing quite right, or we offer the wrong object/idea/strategy/whatever, and that's okay; it's just life. We do miss some of the optional windows entirely, but the stuff that really needs to happen usually happens eventually. When it all falls into place at the right time, though, it's great fun for everyone.

This weekend, we had one of those moments. Duchess got a new bike,* and we subsequently happened to drop by the home of the Blond Family, who keep an armada of bikes. Skipper mentioned her jealousy over Duchess's upgrade to Papa Blond. She was promptly given a bike (the Mudshark!) that L and R Blond have outgrown (though they were still using it to do wheelies and such, because that's the sort of thing the Blonds do on an idle afternoon), and she insisted on taking it to the nearby playground that very afternoon so she could learn to ride. 

Everything came together just right. Within ten minutes, she was pedaling around the playground. Cook and I were a little taken aback, since it took a LOT more pain and time to get Duchess riding a pedal bike by herself. Duchess started learning to ride a bike when she was older and quite a bit taller, on a bigger bike. Skipper wants to learn, she has seen other kids and adults riding a lot (and spent a lot of time in a trailer watching me and Cook pedal), she's nailed down the balance bike thing, and her center of gravity on this tiny bike is about 14 inches off the ground.

Skipper could not be prouder. She's not ready to go pro, having not yet mastered the management of pedals,** but she's looking pretty good. So here are your videos of one of the great achievements of Skipper's life so far, featuring wedgie-picking,** weird distracted narration by me, and nauseating camera movement.

* An old but decent bike in reasonably good shape, miraculously procured off craigslist for $25 in one of those great deals that we almost never manage to land. We had a pretty excellent weekend.

** Her feet slip off the pedals, and she keeps accidentally braking (while never remembering to brake when she actually needs to).

*** I asked Skipper if she really wanted to ride a bike while wearing a dress and rainboots; she felt it was an ideal outfit.

Follow up

Cook's non-polluting bike trip yesterday was to buy clothes (he only had two pairs of work-suitable pants, both of which have comically worn patches on the butt from his bike seat) and groceries. He could have walked, actually, given that the trip was only maybe 3 miles round-trip, but he had limited time and anyway you don't get funny wear patches on your butt by WALKING everywhere.

Cook suggested to Skipper that if she want to make a difference for the environment, she should stop eating dairy, and it was pretty clear from the look on her face that she doesn't care about polar bears THAT much.

Sometimes, it all falls into place.

Sometimes I feel like my life is perfect. Tonight, Cook took Dutch to soccer, leaving me and Skipper at home from 5 to 7:30. In theory, I could have prepared a nice meal, eaten it with Skipper while having pleasant bonding conversation, and put her to bed before Cook and Dutch got home. In practice, I decided to give her a haircut, put her in front of the laptop, and let her watch TV while I cut. This wasn't a great decision, and set us up for a delayed dinnertime, but it was great. At the moment, I truly couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing than hacking haphazardly at my kid's hair while she provided color commentary* for Danny McAskill movies.

Honestly, I was perfectly happy.

I had a lot of moments like that today. I moved wood chips around at Skipper's preschool for a while (working on fulfilling the "parent work hours" requirement), and enjoyed the vast and beautifully-managed garden filled with delightful things like amaranth, muskmelon, tomatillos, and some sort of "Andean tuber." I biked home with Skipper and a big package of toilet paper in the trailer, and it was sunny and beautiful, and Skipper was singing. I picked a lot of tomatoes. It was a nice day. I'm pretty lucky.

Anyway, this is Skipper's haircut. It's very lopsided - I love the left side (her left) so much that I can't bring myself to cut it shorter to match the terrible right side. She was watching "The Voice," which she thought was excruciatingly boring.

* "Wow! Mom, he's balancing on one wheel! Mom, I bet he had to practice a lot! Wow! I probably can't do that! Oh, he jumped!"

One week down, ten to go.

I feel I should post an interesting update, but I have no interesting updates. I can, however, give you boring updates. Here they are!

1) Duchess loves summer. Change! New stuff to do every day! Two big workbooks to work through!* Perfect.

2) Skipper feels uneasy about summer. See above. She does like her "workbook," though, because it's a Hello Kitty coloring book.

3) Swim lessons have begun. Duchess is finding that she lost quite a bit of ground (water?) since last August, and is, I think, a little frustrated already. But she loves her teacher, of course, and her classmates, and will surely enjoy her lessons overall. Skipper is the big surprise, though, demonstrating a startling willingness to get in the water and do swimmy kinds of things. She hasn't had any lessons before, and hasn't even been in a bathtub very often. What with that, her hatred of being washed, and her dislike of any kind of new thing at all, we were pretty sure that she was going to be the Kid Who Spends The Week Sitting By the Pool Crying. There's been some crying, and some resisting, but mostly she's been shockingly enthusiastic about the whole thing. In fact, she's been an entirely different kid-at-swim-lesson type - the Cheerful Kid Who Isn't Paying Attention At All. She looks around, she tries to lick the water, she wiggles around on the steps and falls off and tries to drown herself.... So, yeah. Yet another lesson on How My Expectations About My Kids Maybe Should Be A Little More Flexible. Also, a reminder to acknowledge and appreciate the focused attention that Duchess has always brought to her activities - I've never seen her in a class where she didn't hang on the teacher's every word. Skipper has a different approach and will probably not collect so many rave reviews of her behavior as her sister has.

4) Summer entails biking all over the freaking place. Duchess is a bike champ, riding 3 miles to her daycamp in the morning, and then riding to the pool in the afternoon and then home afterward. Skipper travels even further, in the trailer, requiring patience, if not any actual physical effort. This morning, after we dropped Duchess off, she sang loudly to me most of the way to her preschool. She covered "Clementine," "Twinkle Twinkle," "Shake Your Sillies Out," and "Wheels on the Bus," inspiring me to pedal very quickly.  On the way up hills, she chanted "Go, bike, GO!"

Further updates as events warrant! 

*We can't have any summer slump here, people. She's got one general and one math-only workbook. She's going to learn all 50 states and their capitols by Sept 1. Maybe you forgot that I'm a Tiger Mom now? Or at least a Bobcat Mom. 

Nothing new.

We're still slogging along with the same old, same old. I just felt that I should post something to reassure anybody who might be lying awake at night worrying that something terrible has happened to us. Here for your enjoyment: miscellany.

Spring is reluctantly easing here, with occasional lovely days and a whole lot of rain. Tonight is balmy and beautiful; Cook went to a meeting of map dorks, after which he glided and swooped home on his bike in the dark, and came home exhilarated.*

My job is in transition, possibly to a different setup at a different organization, and possibly to no job at all. I'll find out in May. (This makes it a little challenging to plan summer childcare.)

I got new tires on my bike. Cook bought them for me, and he went into the shop and said "My wife needs tires. She doesn't like to fall down, she doesn't like to go fast, and she hates getting flats. What should I get her?" So now I have these fabulous fat tires on my bike.

Dutch has been watching some women's basketball, including a game featuring a player who is 6'8". I don't think Dutch will reach those lofty heights, but you never know. I've never met a taller 7-year-old.

Skipper** is eagerly anticipating her upcoming third birthday, which she has already decided will feature cheese pizza and chocolate cupcakes. Otherwise, she continues to be rashy and reckless, with a charming love of wordplay*** and an off-putting love of whining and shrieking.

And that's about it. Further bulletins as events warrant.


*In equal parts from the ride and the map dorkery.
** aka "The One Who Isn't Tall"
*** We credit/blame the Grandparents Cook for this.

Memes IRL

Skipper's been riding her balance bike a lot lately. Today she rode it while I walked to pick up Dutch at school. She typically zooms ahead of me, then gets distracted or waits for me, and I keep a steady pace, so we sort of leapfrog our way along. She had some technical trouble at one point, and fell down with her bike as I passed her. She looked at me to verify that she was okay, and then got up and picked her bike up in a business-like way and got back on, while I kept walking ahead of her. We were heading up a long, uphill block that ends at a busy intersection with two crossing bus lines, and there was a small cluster of scruffy young homeless-looking people at the bus stop. I realized that they were watching Skipper,* and they were all smiling, and one of them said "That kid is biking like a boss!" I had not realized that this is something people outside the internets actually say, so I watched them warily as we approached, just in case they suddenly turned into LOLcats. They didn't. They were beaming and they greeted Skipper warmly as we passed. She beamed back.

Skipper looks younger than her almost-three years, because she's short and chubby,** so she looks extra-comical with her bike, and the pride emanates off of her in almost-visible waves. It makes me laugh every time I see her ride, so I understand why the total strangers were delighted to see her. She totally does bike like a boss.

*It's probably worth noting that Skipper was wearing one of her favorite outfits, fuchsia leggings with red patent leather ankle boots and a short furry coat (the hood has ears on it) with a satiny, quilted pink lining, which all adds up with her rashy dry face to make her look (to me) like a tiny, plump Hollywood starlet who has recently fired her stylist and gotten a chemical peel. All she's missing is a pair of enormous sunglasses.

** For the same reason, I also look younger than my age, except for the shocking wrinkling and tragic hollows around my eyes.

Dustin Finney's bike

I went to a traffic safety public meeting tonight, and Dustin Finney's bike was there. Dustin Finney' mom was also there, just a few blocks away from where Dustin was killed last year.

At the meeting, the transportation staff talked a little about Level of Service, which is the way that engineers measure how "well" a road is operating. It measures how long it takes a vehicle to travel a given distance. If there's congestion, the Level of Service deteriorates. The goal  is to get as many cars as possible along a road as fast as possible. Other stuff, like, you know, KILLING PEOPLE, or, say, making pedestrians walk a long way to get to an intersection that isn't terrifying to cross, is secondary. (Though, to be fair, Portland is trying to de-emphasize LoS as the prime measure of effectiveness. The staff who were there are really serious about traffic safety.)

Anyway, that's not exactly what happened to Dustin Finney. But what happened to him is an environment that allows cars to go fast. People are stupid, and if you let them go fast, they do. And sometimes they get drunk and go fast, and kill somebody. Or they look down to finish a text, and kill somebody. Make it easy and convenient and quick for people to drive, and that's what they do. So let's NOT make it easy. Let's make it a little bit harder, because I never want to see another bike that looks like that.

Six things about my week.

I haven't been writing because I've got very little to say. Here, in no particular order and with no attempt to stitch it all together, are your random updates:

1) I crashed my bike today. No cars or kids were involved - it was just me, my bike with its slick tires, and a frost-rimed intersection on which I was turning left. I went down pretty hard, but not very fast, and neither my bike nor I suffered any serious damage (though yikes, ouch). Several bicyclists stopped to make sure I was okay and one of them said helpfully "It's pretty slick out today."

2) Dutch had her first piano lesson with her very cheerful hipster 25-year-old teacher. She loved it. I'm not sure if it's the music, her expectation of immediate great success, or just getting undiluted attention from an adult for 45 minutes, but she's thrilled. I overheard her singing a song to herself this morning that went something like this: "I can't wait for Thursdays! Thursdays are my faaaaaaavorite day of the WEEK! Thursday is when I have piaaaaaaaaano lessons!"

3) Skipper's rash is getting uglier lately. She has a new, sandpapery kind of rash (the internets think she has scarlet fever, but I'm confident that's not the case) on her belly and back, plus the regular eczema on her arms and legs. Nothing seems particularly itchy, and she's not uncomfortable, but it's pretty gruesome. We're cutting back on both gluten and dairy in the hopes that it'll reduce the flareups, if not the base-level rash. Poor kid. In related news, I'm going to launch my first gluten-free baking project this afternoon.

4) I've been doing a little data entry for a short-term project, bringing in enough cash for a few days' worth of groceries. Woohoo!

5) We decorated for the holidays tonight. It was totally hilarious, in a way that I do not have the writing chops to capture in text. You're just going to have to imagine it. These are some of the elements: both kids loudly singing what they think are tuneful holiday songs (Skipper: " HAAAAPPPPEEEEEE KrissssMUSSSSSSS! HAAAAAAPPPPEEEEEE... HAPPPPPEEEEEE!!") completely regardless of the actual music playing on the stereo, Skipper cavorting (rashily) in her underpants around the heat vent saying things like "It's WARM inside my pants!", Dutch reading all of "A Visit From St Nicholas" out loud (unsolicited), the kids fighting like drunk raccoons over possession of a bell ornament, Dutch announcing excitedly "Mom, I think I know what my Gift is! I think it's SINGING!", Skipper running out of the room, shouting "Christmas, goodbye!" and then returning and yelling "Christmas, I'm back!" and I don't know, a hundred more obnoxious, funny, cacophonous, adorable, bratty moments. Cook said later "That was definitely not what I imagined holiday decorating with my family would be like," which he meant in a good way. (I'm pretty sure.)

6) I got an email from somebody named Galadriel, and it wasn't spam.

How To Be Car-less With Kids: Sanctimonious Tedium Ahead!

Here's the question I always want to be asked, and never am: "How do you get around with kids with no car?" I want to be asked this question because I could answer it for HOURS, and I do love to talk about me. And what's a blog FOR but boring unsolicited monologues, after all? (With that said, you should all feel free to not read this post... you've all heard it all before, anyway!)

So here you go. This is how to be carless with kids, according to me. 

1) Locate yourself appropriately. Choose a home with access to bike and transit infrastructure, and a nice array of convenient destinations within walking distance. Choose all your activities, work, school, childcare, etc., based on accessibility. Don't overschedule.

2) Get yourself the right array of equipment, whatever works for you. Being car-free requires that you have options, and it's one of the great joys of escaping the car - when you walk out the door every morning, you have real choices in how to get where you're going. I love that. Here's my array.*

The Ergo. Now on its last legs, it's served us well. I now use it only when I want to take Skipper on trips involving the bus (no transit system is convenient with a stroller) and also more walking than I think she's up for. 

Trusty rusty stroller, also on its second kid. Skipper and I use this for longer home-based walking trips. Dutch, by this age, was both an excellent walker and so enormous she couldn't actually fit in the thing comfortably anymore, but Skipper is neither of those things.

Skipper's wagon, which we use for short trips or carrying large flat things home, like a bunch of tomato seedlings or a pile of wood chips we found in the street with a "free" sign on top. Notice Dutch's bike in the background. She would like me to mention that it is a very good bike. 

Our go-to Skipper-transportation mode. It fits two kids very snugly, or one very comfortably, with room for a giant package of toilet paper rolls, plus several bags of other groceries in the back. (Sometimes Cook or I take the trailer with no kid in it, if we need to fetch something really big.) Cook's bike and my bike both have trailer hitches, so we can easily switch the trailer between our bikes.

My bike. I love it. It's almost as old as me, it's this awesome shade of blue, and check out those brand-new full fenders, baby! Now I have no excuse not to bike in the rain...

This is a bonus piece of equipment. I got it super-cheap at a yard sale, and it's kind of falling apart, but excellent for kid-free walks to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk, a gallon of vinegar, ten boxes of pasta, a giant package of toilet paper, and, you know, whatever else tickles your fancy.

3) There's no 3. That's it.

We bike for most trips.We walk for trips under a mile unless speed or cargo necessitate biking. I take transit for trips downtown, trips longer than 5 to 8 miles (depending on weather and the pleasantness of the route), trips when I really can't be at all sweaty or disheveled when I arrive,**and trips when I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. Cook doesn't take transit at all unless his bike is totally out of commission or he's going somewhere with me and I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. We get a zipcar occasionally, mostly to pick somebody up at the airport. We rent cars for longer trips. We get rides from friends and coworkers sometimes.

So, car-free with kids. Is it sometimes a hassle? Yes. Does it take more time? Yes. Does it put limitations on your life? Yes. Does it require more planning? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes, totally. I used to say that I expected we'd have to buy a car eventually. But I don't say that anymore; I really hope we can get away without being forced to get another car. It feels good to be car-free as a family. It is fun, it is easy, it is convenient, it is healthy, and it enriches us both literally*** and figuratively. We live in a wonderful place, and the activities and destinations to which we're "limited" seem pretty darn varied and terrific to me.**** The extra time that it takes to get around by transit and my own physical effort is not in any way wasted. We spend it getting exercise, seeing the world around us, talking to each other, reading a book, and doing all sorts of other valuable things. All the cheesy aphorisms about travel being part of the experience (The Journey Is The Destination!) feel a lot more true when you're out of the car, and I really value sharing that with my kids.

That is the end of my sermon. Thank you.


*When we get rich, I'm going to get one of these to add to our stable. We have friends who have one, and Dutch loves getting rides on it. I think it'll solve a number of our remaining  transportation dilemmas - giving a ride to a friend, getting Dutch somewhere when she really doesn't feel like riding her own bike, giving Skipper a good option during the awkward period when she'll be too big to comfortably ride in the trailer, but still too small to ride her own bike, etc. 


** I go to a lot of job interviews, after all. 


***Living without a car for over a decade has saved us  probably somewhere between $5 and $10K per year. That's a lot of money. The entire fleet in the photos above, plus Cook's and Dutch's bikes, cost us a little under $1000 total to buy originally. I get a free monthly transit pass through my job (the only benefit I get), and Cook gets a parking-cash-out benefit for not driving to work (his employer takes an enlightened capitalist approach to employee parking), so between those things, we spend very little additional cash on our transportation.  Cook does some basic maintenance stuff himself, and keeping his bike running well costs about $400/year (and that includes investment in decent raingear, lights, panniers, etc.). He rides about 50 miles a week. I ride only about 20, and Dutch about 15, so we have cheaper gear and maintenance needs. If we had none of the employer benefits that now cover almost all of our expenses, I think we could keep our whole fleet running very well, including replacement as needed, for $1000 a year, and meet all our transit needs for $800. Can a car-dependent household get by spending less than $2000/year on transportation? I'm thinking not. 


**** The one thing that I wish we could do more easily is get out of town for day hikes and camping. When we get rich, though, we'll be happy to rent cars more often to do that!

Apparently, exercise and volunteerism are mood-lifters. Who knew?

I'm feeling pretty down these days. Today I find myself with childcare and without work, and  I made myself a to-do list (actually a teux deux list, because I completely love the app) in an attempt to keep myself from just dropping off the kids and then spending the day lying on the couch listening to The Swell Season and feeling sorry for myself.

One of the items on the teuxdeux/prevent-plummeting-into-despair list was to volunteer at the Friday Running Club at recess at Dutch's school. I'd done it once before - volunteers stand at one corner of the playground while the kids run laps, and each time the kids come around, they stop and present their laminated cards for you to check off another box. I loved it. I love seeing them coming toward me, with their wide-open faces, every single thing they feel written all over them.* Some of them are running socially, with friends, and some of them are running alone, and some of them are sprinting, and some are trotting, and they're all just intoxicated with it - with whatever it is about it that works for them, and maybe just with the pleasure of being out of the classroom for 20 minutes. They RUN, some of these kids, like no adult ever runs, like they're both running for their lives and running for sheer joy, at the same time.  You should see them. They look like hope and joy and everything that's good about people, in the shape of small, sweaty, snotty, red-faced, screaming banshees.  It's pretty amazing to me that so many of them participate; many of them run for the entire recess period. And I get to see Dutch, who loves loves loves it that I'm there,*** and her friends, so it's just all good.

So I did that. I left later than I'd planned, so I biked there at top speed,**** standing up on my pedals like I was a first-grader myself, and got there all sweaty and windblown, with freezing red cheeks, and it felt really good. The recess was just as fun as it had been before. Then I biked home, downhill, swooping around corners at daringly high speeds, and that was also excellent.

Anyway, now I'm home, with a cup of tea, listening to The Swell Season, blogging. But I put blogging on my teuxdeux, so it's okay! The take-home message of this post is this: If you're feeling depressed and hopeless, you should go ride your bike and cheer on some sprinting 7-year-olds. That'll fix you right up!


*I only volunteer at the first recess, before lunch,** which is only K-2. I expect the older kids are more jaded, having reached the advanced age of 9.
** This is a really welcome change from last year - the K-2 kids get recess before lunch, so they've burned off a fair amount of steam by the time they sit down to eat.
*** When I told her that my job had evaporated, she said "That's too bad. So can you volunteer at Friday Running Club now?"
**** That is to say, MY top speed, which is very slow. Grandmas out for constitutionals breeze past me. Damn you, grandmas!

Stuff I Like

1) My boots. Oh, I love them. (In related news, it turns out that tights that aren't fifteen years old and ill-fitting are way, way more comfortable than tights that are.)
2) My new stand mixer. Oh, I love it. You should SEE it mixing stuff! You guys, it CUTS IN BUTTER FOR ME!
3) Skipper's new attitude toward preschool. Apparently being wrenched away from her routine for a week made her realize that her routine isn't all that bad, actually.
4) The internet. We have to hire a babysitter to cover the two days a week when Skipper's not in preschool, because I have a new (temporary, part-time) job,* and the internet is so great for this sort of thing. Remember how people used to put help wanted ads in the newspaper? How did people find babysitters before there was craigslist?
5) My new commitment to being a Tiger Mother for ten minutes a day. I'm pretty excited about this. Dutch is taking an after-school Spanish class two days a week, and she came home from her first class today whining about how she hated the class. She hates it because the teacher doesn't speak any English, and Dutch doesn't understand anything and IT'S SO HARD, MOM. I gave her a stern lecture about how learning is hard, and nothing worth having in this world comes easy** and blah bitty blah bitty blah blah blah. Later, Cook gave her the same lecture*** and then I decided that she would have to practice her Spanish vocabulary ten minutes a day. Tonight she painstakingly made seven flashcards, and memorized their contents. Rrrarr!
6) Our ten-year-old wooden drying rack. The sunshine is finished for the year here in Portland, and wet clothing hung outside will only get wetter.
7) Playdough.
8) Furniture slider pads
9) My bike helmet.


*Yeah, I got a job. It's an internship, actually, and it's a good thing, and I'm looking forward to it, but I'm just not very excited about it, somehow. I would have been quite excited about it two years ago. Now I'm so cynical about the prospect of it actually leading anywhere that I can't dig up much enthusiasm.


** Yes, those words came out of my mouth. I was amazed.


*** Except better. It was a little bit inspiring.

Will your birthday party be worth eleven miles of biking?

Yesterday Cook escorted Dutch to a birthday party. The birthday party took place at an amusement park by the river, and they had a choice of biking five and a half miles each way or riding the bus for over an hour each way. They picked bike. It rained. Dutch had an awesome time at the party, and was apparently a total trooper about the biking.

It's Friday NIGHT!

Here's what I've been doing lately, not necessarily in this order:

1) Listening to this song (but not watching the video). What, you don't like the song? You find the subject matter creepy? I don't care.
2) Wishing that our summer weather had happened IN THE SUMMER, instead of waiting until September to do its thing.
3) Having more bike conversion experiences. Today, you guys, I biked ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN!! I biked across the goddamn bridge. I am SO BRAVE! I actually chanted inspirational things to myself for the last half of the trip - "Look at you! You're crossing the bridge! You're biking DOWNTOWN! You're crossing the bridge!" - while dozens of other bicyclists and joggers (!) whizzed past me.
4) Doing laundry. Bike conversion experiences involve a lot of sweating.
5) Deciding that if traffic speed was cut down to a 20 mph maximum everywhere except for limited-access highways, basically everything would be better. Seriously, everything.
6) Wondering how to make Dutch happier, or nicer, or something. I think she's pretty fried from the effort of going to school, which doesn't help, but in general right now, she's just awful. The other night she freaked out at dinner, and stomped out the front door. Skipper immediately started howling, and shrieked "No, Dutch, don't run away!" but Cook and I looked at each other a little dreamily. Then she came back in and was incredibly nice and helpful and cheerful the rest of the evening. We thought maybe she'd been body-snatched, but she went back to being kind of an asshole the next day, so that theory was busted.
7) Watching TV while washing dishes.
8) Obsessively combing Ebay in search of more shoes with lemurs on them.
9) Trying to teach Skipper that it's GOOD to wash your body occasionally.
10) Working.
11) Thinking of ways to prepare and eat tomatoes.
12) Trying to avoid having to explain September 11th to Dutch.

Today a random guy with lots of missing teeth and a strong odor of alcohol helped me fix my bike on my way home from work. (And he really helped me - I would have taken much, much longer to solve the problem he diagnosed and fixed in about 12 seconds, and he was super-nice about my complete mechanical idiocy.) That was a lovely thing.

It's happened.

Goddamnit, I said I wasn't going to be a bike proselytizer. But I am. I still don't care about bikes as bikes. But I have been completely won over by bikes as transportation. Here, as final proof that I have gone over to bike evangelism, I will now present to you, embedded in my blog, a video about biking. Because I kind of love it. Jet packs!

Also, the BTA is good. I've even been a member for a whole year!

Roll On, Oregon from Bicycle Transportation Alliance on Vimeo.

Commuting

Today Dutch went to a childcare program about a mile away. Cook dropped her off and picked her up by bike, and she was delighted to join him for part of his commute. This is their homecoming today.