sometimes i have bad ideas

Now that I live in a neighborhood that actually has a sidewalk I have been wanting to get up early and go for a walk. I have always thought that if we had a dog it would give me a reason to go for a walk on a daily basis (physical fitness alone just seems to be a horrible motivator for me). Anyway, I don’t have a dog but I do have a toddler/little-boy-super-hero. In an effort to get him to go to sleep Monday night I told him that if he went right to sleep I would wake him up early and we would go for a walk!! That actually sounds like a threat but he loves nothing more than waking up at the crack of dawn. Anyway, he did not go right to sleep nor did he wake up early but he STILL wanted to go for a walk when he managed to open his eyes. You see, children to not have any concept of being “on-time” for work/school/etc. They think whatever time you get there is the time you were supposed to get there. So it wasn’t any wonder that the fact that I was going to be late for work was not accepted as a reasonable excuse to not go for a walk as promised.
We had decided the night before that he would actually ride his bike while I walked. We got out his helmet the night before and even tried to locate all four of his “turtles” (our nickname for his elbow/knee pads), we apparently lost 1 in the move. Since I am such a quick study at this Mom thing, I KNOW better not to expect to walk 3 miles with him on the first try. As one would expect, this was a hard lesson learned when attempting to take a toddler into a library and expect him to be quiet while I looked for books. Someone actually held the door open for me as I carried my screaming kid out. I thought I had a blog about that somewhere but I can’t find it. It’s all about baby steps. It’s like the spot cleaning instructions on the back of some chemical cleaners which reads something like “Test a small area before you ruin your entire house with this stuff”. It’s the same with kids – sorta. OK, back to the walk.
I decide that this was actually a good opportunity to make it through a quick trial, we’d just go down to the next street and back. Before we even got to the sidewalk he was already trying to go in the other direction, then his turtle fell off, then he was playing with his brakes. He thought it would be fun to run into the back of my legs as well. We finally get a pretty good pace going, he is riding in front of me, going in a straight line, we almost had a good thing going until I noticed the sprinklers were on and spraying right on the sidewalk ahead of us. “Come on. We have to cross the street.” I said. He starts to cry. “I don’t want to go yet!” he screams in my general direction. “We aren’t going back we just have to walk on the other side because of the sprinklers. Come on!” I urged. Still crying he replies “I want to go under the sprinklers!!” Never try something new when you are in a hurry, when will I learn?
We finally make it across the street and he is barreling down the sidewalk, happy as can be. Out of nowhere he starts “WWWEEEWWW, WEEEEEEW, WWEEEEEW!!!! Keep in mind it is a little after 7AM. His little “Siren” was echoing off of all the houses that surrounded us. “SHHHHHHH!! People are sleeping remember? We have to be quiet” I reminded him of the conversation we had the night before. He continued in a smaller voice “weeeewww, wweeeew, wweeeewwww”. I asked him to turn around at the fire hydrant and found it humorous that he didn’t know what a fire hydrant was “Mr Fireman”.
On the way back I stopped at a driveway and pretended to be a crossing guard. I explained how he was supposed to get off of his bike and walk it across the street. It seemed like a very responsible thing to do right? Well once he got off the bike he didn’t want to get back on. He wanted to play “crossing guard” at each driveway and guess who had to push his bike? Yep, yours truly. After about the third driveway I told him to push his own bike or I was going to give it to some other child that might appreciate it more. I think he was OK with that at first. He pushed it for a little while but got tired very quickly. I took over once it was time to cross the street again and head back to the house. We were both pooped!