Samuel

On Tuesday, Arthur and I took his Strider bike over to the Amazon Skate Bowl so he could do some tricks. This is one of his favorite things to do. I was incredibly impressed at how competent he’s gotten on the Strider. Anyway, I took a few pictures with my phone. Click on the picture at the left to go to the gallery. And if you have kids, let me recommend these balance bikes. Arthur is not quite two three*, and you can see that he’s already having a great time riding a bike. When he’s big enough for a bike with pedals, he probably will never need training wheels. Totally awesome, as I still remember the abject terror of riding with my training wheels off for the first time.

*EDIT: Oh my god, I went back in time.

Arthur riding his new Strider Balance Bike. He LOVES it!

Recently, Arthur got himself a new toy. When he was very little, he did a little bit of work as a beautiful baby in some safety videos. His salary went into a special account for him, the idea being that we’d save it until he was an older kid. And most of it we are, but given the opportunity we had to tap it to get him one of these wonderful inventions. It’s called a balance bike or a running bike, and it’s made by the Strider Company. It’s a small bicycle with two wheels – no training wheels. It doesn’t have any pedals, but it does have an extra wide rear fork with grip tape so that a kid who gets going really fast has a place to put their feet up and coast. This way he can learn to balance on a bicycle gradually first, and add the extra complication of pedals later.

He loves it. It took a week or so to convince him that the bike was cook enough to be worth wearing the bike helmet (not a comfortable accessory, but an important one!) Once he was convinced to give it a try, he was sold. Now there is a daily bike ride at least around the block if not further afield. And he’s started getting going pretty quick. I’m going to start bringing wheels of my own here pretty soon just to keep up.

If you have a kid under 50 pounds, between 1 and 4, I highly recommend these balance bikes. They’re reasonably priced, and totally worth it. The local distributor is a friend of ours, so if you want to get in touch with her you can leave a comment here or fill out the contact form at the bottom of this (and every) page.

Hey there sport fans. Today, the family went to the Oregon Logging Conference. This seems like a strange event for a family of environmentalist, earth conscious, back to the land type organic granola crunchers like us. And it is, but there is one marvelous redeeming feature of this event; lots and lots of machines which on Saturday morning they let kids climb around on (in what is probably a massively bad idea from a liability standpoint). You can see some pictures of Arthur and his friends climbing around here. But in this post, what I want to show you is exactly how dangerous a place the world really is. I went around the displays of machines looking for pictures of everyone’s favorite stick man getting mangled in various ways. It’s amazing all the bad things that can happen to you when you’re not careful around machines. Check it out;

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Arthur’s toes wiggle and press, scratch and explore everything. This is especially true when he’s thinking hard about something. When he’s concentrating it almost seems as though he’s trying to manipulate his environment by sheer force of will, and what’s scary is that sometimes I think he just might do it. I love his toes. I love the way his true feelings are always betrayed by them. I love how they’re still soft and babyish, but slowly and ever so surely becoming kid toes; scraped up, muddy, calloused.

toddler toes

In my life, I’ve had some good friends who have been transgendered. Recently, our toddler has started asking about how Mama and Papa seem to have different parts. Mama was trying to explain how girls have yonis and boys have penises, but she got caught up as she tried to explain this in such a way as to be comprehensible to a toddler but not impose hetero-normative ideas as first principles. If anyone reading this has any ideas, they would be welcome.