Biking Baby

"Do you want to ride in the stroller or on your scooter?" I ask Matilda.

Her answer, of course, "Ride my scooter."

She is getting fast enough to keep up with my walking, and I am glad, because now her "commuting" time has become fun and worthwhile. No longer does she need to doze in the stroller as we travel around town. She is an active participant happily engaged in an activity she loves.

We begin the journey to the rec center to pick up Oscar from preschool. As we near the first driveway intersecting our path of travel, I am suddenly disheartened. I realize at that moment, "Oh, no! I have another child I have to train in bike safety. I have to start all over again with another one!"

This makes me feel tired. I remember feeling this way when she was born and I contemplated the miles of diapers we would have to journey before reaching potty training. But this one I did not anticipate. Bike training! Extremely important for our lifestyle. Why did I not think this one through ahead of time?

I sprint to catch up to Matilda, and begin my "Rules of the Road" lecture. This will probably be a continuous stream for most of this season. She is only two, and so far she has demonstrated zero understanding of what she needs to do to be allowed to bike with the Newton family. Though I do discuss traffic laws with the kids, my basic rules when I am walking and they are rolling are pretty simple:

1) Stop at every corner.

2) Do not cross a street until I say it is okay.

3) Look to the left and right at every "blind" driveway. (I must see heads looking back and forth. We are usually walking the same way every day, so I teach them which driveways are blind, usually by letting them experience backing out "blindly.")

4) When I yell, "Stop!", STOP. Instantly. Or else.

If any of these rules are breached, I have been known to take away a bike for a week or two, and pack the youngster back in the stroller. Luckily for me, at the age when I am training my kids, bike riding rates up there as THE most fun activity. If I threw Marek in the stroller now, he would be grateful for the ride!

Today, I am particularly unnerved by Matilda zooming along unattended on her scooter. I have just learned there has been another fatal bike accident in our small town. This is the second in the past year. The first involved a drunk driver. This one involved an RTD bus and the dark.

I had to look up the statistics. Could bike fatalities possibly be this common? According to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, there were 784 fatal bike accidents in 2007 (the most recent data I could find). Wow. And we've had two of them here.

I must admit I am a particularly obscenely, angry pedestrian/bicyclist. I blame the automobile driver for everything, because from my perspective, that is usually the case. Or so thinks the angry mother hen, whose child has just been cut off by a motorist on their cell phone - again. Sometimes I have thought I should carry a bullhorn around with me to keep the drivers in line.

For today I will just make a suggestion. If you have not rode a bicycle around town in a while, hop on. I am not suggesting this for the exercise or the environment, or the fun (truly I feel like a giddy teenager when I am on my bike). This is for the experience. I do not believe that a driver truly knows how to watch out for a bicyclist until that driver has seen the road from the bicyclist's perspective.

And I also don't believe that my children will truly know how to watch out for an automobile until they have experienced driving a car. Fortunately this one won't happen for a few years.

So please - watch out for them.