something like this

Here are three fun biking events from the past two weeks:

1. Family Ride to Tiburon

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we finally took a great ride that we’d been planning forever with our friends Rik and Sherri and their two awesome kids. We went from Mill Valley to Tiburon on a clear and windy Saturday afternoon. The ride was amazing; only one challenging hill and mostly beautiful bike path, tons of people out enjoying the day, stunning views of the bay and the city to the south. Everything went smoothly and the kids all had a fantastic time. We stopped at Waypoint pizza and got the back room all to ourselves – the food was made even more tasty by our ride beforehand. After we ate, we admired the view for a bit before heading back home.

Tom has this great app called Runkeeper on his iPhone which tracks all the stats on your adventures – distance, time, pace and even elevation – using the phone’s gps. Here’s the screen for our return ride from Tiburon:

How awesome is that?! The kids loved checking out the route and looking at the elevation chart – speed certainly is variable when your riders range from six to, well, you know, more than six. I love the information design on these screens – they’re easy to read and beautiful to look at. So satisfying. All in all, it was an incredible day.

2. Walk and Wheel Wednesdays

As I’ve mentioned here before, I put in a small amount of time for the Safe Routes to School committee at our kids’ elementary school. One of the ways we’re trying to build participation in the program is to encourage a weekly walk/wheel/carpool to school day. We try to drum up enthusiasm for the whole idea by putting up posters and a table at the school entrance on the first Wednesday of each month. Whole Foods was good enough to give us some bags of granola to hand out to the students, and we’ve been stamping hands to show they participated. However, we’ve been struggling to come up with other ways to get the message out without printing up hundreds of flyers that will just be tossed when the kids go home after school.

Last week, I started thinking about edible advertising. So I bought a couple bags of cuties and some food markers and put the message right on the clementines.

They had faces on one side, and “Walk & Wheel Wednesdays” on the other. It was fun watching the kids trying to decide which face to choose, and I think they worked pretty well. Anyone out there have other ideas? I’d love to hear them.

3. Xtra Clean

I’ve carried lots of fun things with my xtracycle.

I love having a bike that can carry my vacuum cleaner.

We participated in International Walk to School Day here in our town today. Over the past few weeks, the Safe Routes to School committee at our elementary school has prepped for this event; we worked with students to make posters, promoted the event all over the school and arranged for healthy snacks and Safe Routes patches to hand out as walkers, bikers and carpoolers rocked up to school.

Here’s a shot from the path to school. That lady on my xtracycle? Not me. It’s one of our fantastic PE teachers. I rode to school early this morning with my bike completely loaded up with a box of granola samples kindly donated by our local Whole Foods, a huge tupperware of orange slices, serving trays, you name it. The minute I arrived, I saw our PE teacher, who commandeered my bike to chase down the principal, who was heading up the bike path to meet the crowd of walkers heading in from the community center. I didn’t get to see the path when things were going full tilt, but I heard it was mayhem. Woohoo!

Look who’s got new wheels! He finally has hand brakes and gears, thanks to a lucky garage sale find. He’s beyond happy.

Here are some riders filling in one section of our bike racks. It’s tricky to take shots without any faces in them – thanks for this one, Tom!

The bike racks filled up pretty quickly…

Check out that sweet minty green bike! The black one behind it doesn’t look that fancy in this shot, but it’s got a very cool industrial rear rack. Having good equipment sure makes the decision to ride an easier one.

In the end, we handed out 270 badges to students who walked, rolled and carpooled to school this morning. Not a bad turnout!

I was standing next to the playground after school with some other kindergarten parents yesterday. These are new acquaintances, so we were chatting, getting to know each other a bit. Suddenly, Hot Wheels ran up.

“May I please get a drink of water?” he asked.

“Sure – go ahead!” I said.

There was a slightly awkward pause. I turned to the other mothers and said, “We have strict water rationing in our household.”

Thankfully they laughed and one said, “When we were at camp this summer, my son ran up to me and said, ‘Mom – can I play?’”

So what’s with the kids, eh? They won’t ask if they can roll one of their bikes down the ditch behind your retaining wall, or climb the tree with the skinniest branches, but they’ll ask if they can drink water? Instead of even answering the innocent requests, we really should be looking around wildly for whatever nefarious plot is really happening in the background.

And now for something completely different: I had some surprise visitors today:

I don’t know their names because they had collars but no tags. As I rounded the bend to our street on my bike today, they were poking around the bushes by the restaurant on our corner. I started up the street and saw a woman heading my way with a concerned, ‘where are those dogs’ look on her face. Thinking they all belonged together I told her the dogs hadn’t gone far. She replied that they weren’t her dogs, but she’d just seen them running across the super busy street together and was trying to nab them before they got hit.

One thing led to another, as it usually does, and once we’d rounded the dogs up it made sense to put them in my house as opposed to her car. Turns out the rescuer was my neighbor’s sister, which was fun – I’ve heard her name for so many years, it was great to finally meet her.

After I called the humane society and gave the dogs some water, I had that funny feeling you get with a baby that’s clean and fed… just what do I do with you now? I couldn’t put them in the yard, because our fence is more decorative than secure. I closed all the doors to the other rooms, since the lab was still young and interested in chewing on the kids’ toys. So they just followed me around as I put things away and tidied up.

That border collie was sweet as anything. She was clearly the older one and just so gentle and beautiful. Too bad whenever she sidled up for some scratching, the lab would jump all over her and shove her away. He was such a pup – all wiggly and pushy and eager. I hope their owner gets reunited with them quickly, and buys them some tags!

Last week, the subject of birthdays had come up, and Tom asked Hot Wheels who he might like to invite to his birthday party this year. After listing a few friends’ names we were familiar with, he casually added, “my girl.” (He actually said “my gril” but I thought the barbecue image would just throw you all off.) It made me wonder when he started listening to the Temptations. Tom got to the bottom of it; Hot Wheels’ girl is a new classmate (let’s just call her K) who is super cute and tomboyish and fun. Turns out she likes him too. So fine, I think. Sweet.

Then yesterday I was chatting with Hot Wheels about his day, asking him what he did at school, and he said, “I played with K.” “That’s great,” I replied, “What did you play?”

“We played the kissy game.”

And that’s where we are. 3 weeks in. He was crushed to learn that it’s simply not appropriate to kiss your classmates. I tried to explain it to him without my voice rising and cracking in panic over the hours of teacher meetings in our future. 3 weeks in, and thankfully only just over 500 to go. No problem!

I guess it’s pretty hypocritical of me to say anything; I myself was engaged in kindergarten. When Bret and I looked down the corridor of our elementary school, we could see the future. The rest of our class would leave fifth grade through the doors at the end of that hall and turn right towards middle school; we’d simply turn left to wedded bliss. That was the plan, anyway. Bret’s family moved away the next year. Stupid Montagues.

Overall, however, school has been going great, particularly in kindergarten. My favorite thing so far has been hearing Hot Wheels singing new songs around the house practically every day. One afternoon he was snacking away in the kitchen and suddenly started up with Waddly Acha. I hadn’t thought of that one for years – I can still see my cousin Mary teaching it to me when I was in elementary school (this was years after I’d been dumped by my fiancé) and it brings back such great memories.

Honey’s classes are serious now, because they are in Fourth Grade. Fourth Grade, it turns out, is not for sissies. It’s not good enough to get the problems right, you have to write them perfectly as well. One missing comma means you get the question wrong. Very serious. Except for one day…

There’s a teacher across the hall named Mr. S. He’s a fourth grade teacher and he means business. He wears a suit to school and calls his kids by their last names. Or sometimes by a number. His room is a bit like basic training. However, he has an impish streak and loves to drift over to Honey’s classroom and interrupt her teacher, whose name is Mrs. S. (no relation). One day last week, he kept meandering into their classroom. “We have work to do, Mr. S.” Mrs. S. said to him. “You have to go now.” But he kept on drifting back in and bugging them. Finally, Mrs. S. closed the door after him and locked it. A short while later, the kids could hear the classroom printer running. Their teacher took the paper out of the tray and held it up. “Dear Mrs. S,” it read, “HI! – Mr. S.”

Enough school stories for now. Let’s look instead at this gorgeous bag of cucumbers that Joan dropped off yesterday.

Trust me – they’re cucumbers. I know they look like lemons in this picture – that’s because they’re lemon cucumbers. Tricky little things. She popped a fennel blossom on the top just to make it pretty.

The guys did go back to school last week. I contemplated making a run for it, but decided I’m not cut out for a life on the lam. So they went, and what do you know – it was really fun to see everyone again. Both kids have great teachers this year, and nice classes.

Hot Wheels was highly suspicious heading in, but he skipped out of the classroom at the end of the day and said, “That was great!!” We also found out over the weekend that he has a new best friend, but he can’t remember her name. Honey seems to have turned into a parochial school girl – she just sighs over her blue zippered cardigan and her ‘caramel’ pants. She’d probably give anything for a blazer and pleated skirt ensemble. Helloooo Nancy Drew!

It’s that time of year – schools are wrapping up, and parents are wondering just what to wrap up for their children’s hard-working teachers. It’s always a dilemma. My cousin Maura and I usually end up emailing each other around now to brainstorm fresh ideas. (Now Maura, it should be noted, once gave their teachers a Margarita kit at the start of summer. That is what you call a hard act to follow. Not sure what I can add to her idea bin.)

But in the interest of sharing, I thought it might be handy to post my top 5 favorite teacher gifts:
1. Cute mugs with funny sayings on them
2. Scented candles
3. Lotion
4. Soaps
5. Anything with an apple on it!

I know what you’re thinking…. and you’re welcome.

No, no, no, TEACHERS, wait – I’m just kidding!! Shoot, I didn’t mean to, honestly, IT’S GOING TO BE OK! Stop crying!!! Please? Here – have a hankie.

Seriously though, some of my best friends happen to be teachers, so I believe I have an inside track on what they like and need. (That and I’ve asked them.) When asked what they like to receive for gifts, most say “nothing,” because they’re so well respected and compensated. Oh, no, that’s not it. They say “nothing,” because kindness is its own reward. Hm. Maybe they say “nothing” because they’re afraid they’ll receive objects with apples painted on them. Anyway, after “nothing,” they usually say a note is good. And I have to agree – a thoughtful note always rocks. But after that, they might say something like, “wellll, if I had to choose something, gift cards are nice. Oh and lots of cash.” Ok I made that last line up – but I’m very intuitive, and I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re thinking.

These days in our schools, the common thing to do is for the room parents to put out the word that they’re gathering money from everyone, and then they get a VISA gift card that the teachers can then use wherever they’d like. I’m all for this, because a bunch of parents pooling modest donations together makes for a more substantial gift to each teacher. So we go with that plan, and Honey writes her own notes to all her various teachers, and I write a note to her primary teacher.

This year, Hot Wheels is leaving his preschool, which means it’s our last year there as a family as well. It’s a lovely school, and in addition to the donations to his main room teachers, we wanted to give all the teachers a token of appreciation. They all look after him at some point during the day, and we’ve been at the school for years now. I’m writing them notes, but we also baked up some thank yous as well. We had an Anzac thank you, a chocolate chip thank you, and a straight chocolate thank you.

We stacked the cookies into these bright bowls and topped them with cards from Hot Wheels.

Unsurprisingly, the pictures were all of cars. (Peculiar looking, but cars nonetheless.)

These fit my criteria of being mostly consumable with some personal effort thrown in. I’m always open to new ideas, though, so any teachers who want to weigh in – here’s your chance!

Happy summer.

Goodbye school, helloooooooo summer!

Let the games begin.

THREE

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DAYS!

2.5 weeks till summer vacation.