« Pulling my strings | Home | I’m betting it wasn’t a compliment »
Spending Sunday night at the grocery store…
By Betsy Richter | 8:22 pm“Mom, look! I’m actually doing it! I’m DOING IT!”
It’s been one of those busy kid-full weekends. Today, I snuck out this morning to spend a few hours at BarCamp Portland (leaving the kids behind to battle each other over Mario Cart Wii.)
Once I got back, it was time to tackle the totally overgrown front lawn. It was so bad that it took two of us, in fact – The Mogul to pre-mow with the people-powered rotary mower, then me following after with the cordless electric putt putt mower.
So when I announced at 4 pm that I was heading to the grocery store & my daughter countered with the heretofore unmentioned Sunday night deadline for learning how to ride a two wheeler already (bike safety classes start shortly at school, I believe; she is “the only person in her class who still can’t ride a two-wheeler, Moooooooom. I have to learn TODAY!”), well – so much for grocery shopping
Instead, after a bit of um, heated discussion about when to share information and why we might not be able to make this often-attempted goal happen today, I dragged the hand-me-down bike down the steps and out to the sidewalk yet again for another try. Insisted that it was a futile exercise until we a) got air in the tires and b) got the seat adjusted. Threw the bike in the car to haul it up to Community Cycling Center at 5 pm after the child first tried it without air in said tires anyway (hooray for the nice guy at CCC!) Bought dinner at the local sandwich shop, and settled in at the local playground with the wide expanse of blacktop for what I thought would be another painful experience.
Uh, nope. Within three minutes, she was moving along entirely under her own power. Within five minutes, you could hear her enthusiastic cries from 20 feet away. And she’d come back every few minutes from her victory laps to exclaim that this was just the ‘best fun EVER’, or accept yet another round of congratulations for figuring out how to make it all work.
Forty-five minutes later, she stopped long enough to call her dad via cell phone. Finally agreed to take a celebratory gelato break. Wanted to head right back to the park afterwards for even more bike riding, but grudgingly went with me to the grocery story instead. Insisted that we had to detour over to the sporting goods section of Fred Meyer to get her a bike lock. Spent too much time trying to coerce me into a new bike horn….new bike handle grips…new bike accessories.
So that’s why I didn’t get back from the grocery store until 8:30 this evening.
Am I wiped out? Yep. But was our last-minute agenda change worth every single little bit of all of the agita expended, both today and in days previously?
Absolutely.
Topics: Drama Mama | 2 Comments »
May 4th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Hurray for DM! Bike Riding Convert! You rock — I’d have been putting her off to let me go to the store.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
about a year or two ago, Lola went out on the playground by our apartment, within a ridiculously short amount of time, a friend of hers had managed to get her riding a two wheeler. I didn’t even see it. She left the house not riding and came back in riding. it was like wow. She seems to like learning new things when I’m not around to see it…