Out & About

With my sweetie working under deadline on a contract job, I decided to take the kids out today. Okay, that sounds so good and altruistic, but really they were driving me nuts and if I wasn't going to kill them we needed to be somewhere else. So we went out to run a few errands and somehow ended up on the bike trail down by the river.

I love hiking with my boys. Their clear and questioning view of things make me feel like I am seeing everything I normally miss. I know that sounds so trite. Everyone says that about their kids. But there seems to be something fundamentally different about me and the way I process my environment visually. Maybe it's years of needing corrective lenses and stubbornly refusing to wear them that makes me sort of take in the whole picture, but skim over the details. It's one of the things I love about my sweetheart - walking around with him always makes me feel like I move through the world with my eyes closed. He is unusually observant, and the children seem to take after him.

So we walked, and we talked about everything. All the recumbent bicycles, so different from the two wheeler my big kid mastered just about this time last year. The sound of the summer bugs, buzzy and crackly in the trees. The smell of boat exhaust and warm, humid river air. The archery range, where the paranoid part of me wanted to walk by really fast just in case someone had their bow pointed the wrong way. The boys picked up rocks and sticks and oak balls, and the little one complained good-naturedly about sand in his sandals. And then came this rather startling observation from my 6 year old.

"Mama, why is it that when girls are little like me they like to ride bicycles, but when they get to be grown up girls they don't like it so much?"

Huh? I was puzzled. Probably almost half the cyclists we'd seen go by were women. Where was he getting this idea? The next family group that went past, I pointed out that there was a woman riding with her husband and sons.

"Yeah," he exclaimed excitedly. "She has two boys just like you do! And look, the dad has a trailer on his bike with one of the kids riding on it." He paused for a second. "I guess the dad is pulling the trailer because the mom isn't strong enough to do it."

Double huh??

I am totally confused as to where he is getting these ideas. They certainly do not come from his dad and me. I handled it okay, I think, offering some alternative ideas as to why mom wasn't pulling the trailer rather than launching into some tirade about how women can do pretty much anything that men can. I guess it's just another window into the expanding world view he'll get from the kids at school, and we'll have to do what we can to counter it.

Add another challenge to that list I had running.