A hot, sunny Midwestern day. A well-groomed rail trail. Two intrepid riders. That's how it started out. My daughter has been going on longer and longer rides with me on the Trail-a-bike, so today I figured we'd try a great rail trail that goes past a heron rookery.
We made it about a mile in before she freaked the fuck out. She was screaming at the top of her lungs behind me, so I stopped. Any time a bug or a fleck of mud landed on her, she couldn't handle it. She felt like she was being attacked by bugs, and nothing was going to get her back on the damned bike. In fact, she was done walking, too.
So I put her up on my shoulders, grabbed the bike, and hiked the mile or so back to the parking lot, sweat pouring down.
Looks like we're sticking to the roads for now.
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But, you got decent exercise in?
Not only that, but we just took another ride, but on the road. Now I'm sipping lemonade inside a coffee shop.
This post brought back memories and gave me a smile. My older daughter (she's 18 now) did things like that on a regular basis when she was little. Some of those incidents are now family stories that we all laugh about. Hard to deal with at the time sometimes, but when she is older the two of you will have a few laughs I think.
My ten-year-old son faked me out one time pretending to sleep in the car when I pulled up to the house. I had retrieved his 75 lb body and carried it up the stairs, into the house and halfway to the second floor before he broke a smile. (I weigh 125 so it was a considerable load.) Still, it did make me laugh.
I took my daughter @ 2yo out on a bike seat behind me and she carried on so that somebody called the police thinking that I was kidnapping her. We were on vacation. Oh what fun.
Ahh for those golden days of yesteryear, when we were told that you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die (still haven't figured out why I would want to hurry that process along...).
A few years ago I took my then 6 year-old daughter on a canoe trip through the New Jersey Pine Barrens. We rented a canoe and equipment from a local livery.
Now these canoes are stored outside and as a result they tend to pick up all kinds of visitors.
We'd been on the water for about 20 minutes when my daughter totally freaked out, stood up and started to try and climb out of the canoe - while we're in the middle of the river.
There was no intelligible sound coming from her lips but as I held tightly onto her life-jacket to stop her from going overboard I gathered from her gesticulations that there was something on the bow of the canoe. I spotted a tiny spider crawling along the gunwale and promptly started to try and whack it with the paddle.
And that's when I lost it ... I just totally cracked up at the absurdity of the situation: We were in the middle of the river, violently rocking side to side, my daughter had one foot up on the side, I had one hand on her and the other hand was trying to beat a totally inoffensive arachnid to death with a four-foot long improvised club.
The two humans didn't go swimming, I assume that the spider abandoned ship.