Triking

This morning I took S-Boogie and Little Dude to the park. We do this a lot, but not for the past few weeks, and never before with S-Boogie's new trike (Foxy J has taken S-Boogie to the park on her trike, but I haven't). I loaded Little Dude into his comfy sling, helped Boogie onto her tricycle, and off we went.

S-Boogie's snazzy new tricycle has a bar with a handle that extends up from behind the seat, allowing an adult to push it. This is nice, since Boogie doesn't have much of a concept of pedaling yet. There's also a mechanism which allows you to lock the steering handles, but this doesn't work so well going down a sidewalk because the trike doesn't go completely straight--it tends to veer to one side or another, and then you have to lift the front up to redirect it. So I let Boogie steer, figuring she's got to learn how sooner or later.

The problem is not that S-Boogie doesn't understand the concept of steering. If you tell her to turn away from the curb, she will turn the trike away from the curb. The problem is that she has the attention span of a toddler, which is little to none. This means that we have to go very slow, and I am constantly saying, "Turn away from the curb," "Turn away from the grass," "Watch where we're going," and "Please, keep the front wheel pointing forward." Meanwhile, S-Boogie is watching the sprinklers we pass, the lawnmower, the flowers.

If these shadows remain unchanged, this girl is never getting a driver's license. Maybe we should get rid of the car.