I took a walk with Lucy today. This is a near-daily occurrence; I need to get out of the house, she needs to get out of the house; we both seem to enjoy some time of me pushing her around the neighborhood. I even get some exercise and time to think. Since we bought Lucy a super-cool trike with a pushbar for Momma, she likes it even better.
Except. Sometimes I feel guilty. (Big surprise, right?) Because tho she does like to ride, she likes to walk even more. And stop, and smell things, like flowers (by smell, I mean yank off the stems and occasionally cram them into her mouth). And so while riding strapped to her trike, she waves at flowers and says, Ass? Ass?
I know it means: Hey, Mom, can I get a closer look at those? Down, please.
Except it kind of ruins the momentum and the exercise and the thinking to take a leisurely stop-and-eat-flowers break..
So usually I ignore the gestures and the requests and keep on triking.
But today I felt magnanimous. Plus, she'd earlier put up with a two hour car ride. So I undid her little jerryrigged safety harness (my dad's old belt) and let Lucy gather rosebuds! While she might!
Except, instead of gazing meaningfully at the roadside blossoms, she took off down the sidewalk. Happy as a clam to walk, rather than ride.
That's when I realized I had made a serious miscalculation.
She would not get back on the trike. And since it's the trike, with the jerryrigged harness, and not the stroller, with an actual harness, there was no convincing* her otherwise.
Thankfully, I'd had my moment of magnanimity fairly close to our house, instead of a mile away. Because I had to carry a very wiggly baby part of the way home, while pushing a trike at the same time.
Gather ye toddlers, while ye may.
*"Convincing", ie, strapping her in because I'm bigger than her. Sometimes it pays to have a small kid. Though she is wiry.
1 comment:
You'll be bigger than her for a little while yet. But then if you have smaller ones, you can't gather the bigger one any more... Hey, you need me to take an old single-kid stroller off your hands now that you have a supercool one?
I'm avoiding the park now (even tho Sadie could manage it) because no way am I going to sling Sadie and push Audrey AND OWEN back up the hill. And we could all walk, but... while I physically CAN still gather Audrey, not so much while slinging Sadie. Uphill. You see my conundrum. But it feels silly to buy a single stroller to use just until Sadie's big enough for the double. Sigh.
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