Mobility Rules

One of the interesting things about kids, is that there are stages you go through that the parenting books just don't mention.

When a child is still a baby, mobility is easy - bundle up Junior and go. You may use a baby carriage, or a carrier, but, aside from the extra baggage of diapers, a change of clothes, formula and snacks , but you as a parent are relatively mobile. You can (and probably do) drag your child all over the place, from shopping to the park to the library. Babies are transportable. Damnit, they practically have wheels built in these days!

As they get older, changes cause some new refinements, but for the most part, until around the age of three, these issues can be overcome. You switch from carriages to strollers, unload the baby carrier for a backpack of a wagon, or grab my particular favorite - a burley (three-wheeled chariot) that you can tow behind your bike. Zachery and I zoomed all over the neighborhood - parks, the local pool, the bike trails, my cousin's house...anything reachable via bike became instantly accessible.

Then they hit age four and you abruptly hit what I like to call the mobility wall. They are too big to ride in most strollers or bike burleys, too heavy to physically carry, and too independent to ride any lengthy distance in a wagon...and they don't walk fast...or far. Suddenly the glorious freedom of mobility sags like a deflating balloon. Every neighborhood trip suddenly becomes measured by the formula of "how far can/will he walk".

It sounds trite and overblown (at least it probably does if you aren't a parent...), but the reality is that your world shrinks, your options become fewer if you can't access a car and some of the places and things that you previously were able to do with ease become ventures fraught with serious effort and time. Try explaining to any four-year old why you can't zip down to MacDonalds for lunch on Saturday when your wife has the car. Yes you can (and probably will) drag the kid onto a bus, or altenatively relentlessly walk him the long blocks south in a Bataan Death March-like trek to the Golden Arches...at least you wil try. Once.

The answer, obviously, is to try to restore your mobility. This is a simple answer, but harder to implement. In my case our efforts last year to get Zack onto a bike came to naught, maily because Zachery found sitting on the bike made him nervous and the bike in question wasn't a particularly well-suited for him. He preferred to ride his small electric three-wheeler which moved at such a sedate pace that the one time he insisted on driving it to the local park, the usual ten minute walk actually took twenty minutes... His aunt very kindly decided late this summer to surprise him with a new bike, a purchase we had put off in the face of my employment situation.

Zack was thrilled. His new bike was a red-and-black dirt bike, with fat, over-sized knobby tires and a raging mongoose emblazoned on the frame (well, the packaging claimed it was a mongoose. I thought it bore an astonishing resemblance to a slightly off-kilter squirrel that used to haunt a park I ate lunch in frequently). The package was completed by a set of training wheels, to help diminish his understandable fear of falling off that had scuppered our previous attempts. After two attempts to add the training wheels (the first one failed after I foolishly attached the wheels wrong, causing Zack to cant over, biking with a decidedly rakish tilt...) he was off and running.

After innumerable practice runs, Zack is now comfortable enough to venture out of the driveway and down the sidewalk, each day wanting to venture further and further. Last night, with the sun etching the sky a vibrant pink, we actually biked around the block, a distance that would normally have taken us at least ten minutes walking to complete.

"Let's go biking" is now a recurring suggestion, although it is tempered by our local traffic and by practical limits on a five-year olds muscles.

Our mobility wall has been shattered. I'm so proud of my boy.

Comments are always welcome. You can reach me at dadchronicles(at)hotmail.com.