The Brave Sophia Blog: 3rd Annual Mother's Day in the Park

Every Mother's Day since we've lived here, we've enjoyed an AWESOME bike ride on the Going-to-the-Sun road. It was really important to me to do it again this year, but since it was our first ride of the year -- and since we have a new addition to the family -- logistics proved to be a little difficult, but this is what I came up with: Dominic in his car seat inside the bike trailer -- and since there was no longer any room for Sophia there (and she can't ride far enough yet) -- Sophia on a trail-a-bike. Problem Solved!

[Jim, do you remember when we saw this contraption -- it effectively makes a tandem bike for an adult and a kid in Sunriver? You commented, "Oh! That looks fun!" And the parent gave us an exhausted look and said something to the effect of, "Not really!" That is a trail-a-bike.]

Once we got the trail-a-bike, however, it seemed that 2 things were clear: 1) it was too large for Sophia; and 2) she couldn't be trusted to stay on the thing without any help. So, my dad mounted the handle bars on backward (so she could at least reach them) and I bought a separate seat which strapped her in. Problem solved!

I knew we couldn't go into this ride cold turkey, so I suggested she and I take a ride around the neighborhood. (I should have known, it's my daughter after all...) That first ride was a total disaster. She screamed the entire time. So, again knowing our daughter, it was time to double down: we would ride the thing every day for the next two weeks until she didn't scream any longer. So that's what we did. And (good for her!) we got to the point where she was begging to go on it because it was so much fun. Problem solved!

[Oh yeah, and Greg is on call Mother's Day. So we schedule it for the Saturday before. Problem solved!]

So the morning of the trip Greg woke up early to pack up the car (rookie mistake -- we should have done it the night before) when he realized that the trail-a-bike didn't fit in our Thule rack on top of our car (unfortunately, he actually put it on the car before discovering that). Bummer. So I rearranged the car seats in the Outback to make it so I could fold down part of the back seat in order to fit the trail-a-bike and the trailer in the back. Problem solved!

However, we pull out the bike rack only to discover that the thing has rusted itself in place, no longer making it adjustable -- rendering it totally useless on the Outback. Thankfully Greg bought our way out of THAT problem by making an emergency trip to Sportsman to buy us a new bike rack. [There is a longer, more drawn out part of this story that involves screaming children and me trying to fit everything into the much smaller Impreza, but I'll spare you those details.] New rack = Problem solved!

But that means that 3 hours after we started getting ready for this trip we finally departed for the park.

However, in the spirit of everything being way more difficult than it should be, about 1 mile away from home, Dominic started screaming bloody murder. [Yeah, I know...what were we THINKING?!?!]

So, we pulled over at a park to take care of Dominic while Sophia and Greg force fed themselves our picnic lunch (we had breakfast an hour before). Unfortunately, taking Dominic out of the carseat revealed poop everywhere. So we cleaned out Dominic's car seat, changed his diaper and clothes on the park bench (despite the wind gusts!), and fed him before trying again to get back on the road to the park -- 4 hours after we started this whole saga. This time, (THANK YOU GOD) we were successful!

We got to the park, put together the various children-moving contraptions and enjoyed a LOVELY our bike ride without further incident!