And Yet Another Fine Parenting Moment for the Stringhams

After an immense amount of frustration and annoyance with my inability to place pictures within my blog, I have decided to just skip over the many important events that have taken place in our lives (trips to the zoo, Red Butte Garden, the end of school, our Summer Solstice party, our trips to Bear Lake, swim meets, Megan's 2nd birthday, etc.., etc.), leave those posts undone, and give this blogging thing another try.  If this doesn't go well, I may have to quit the whole thing. ( It seems so sad that none of this is documented but at least I have some pictures.) 

So, now back to the topic at hand.  Partly due to the astronomical cost of filling the suburban with gas, and partly just to see if we could do it, Shawn and I made a decision to try to cut down on our car trips this summer.  And, we have been relatively successful.  Shawn has been commuting to work on his bike whenever possible, and our daily trips to the pool for swim team practice and lessons have been almost exclusively by bike.  I pull the 2 youngest girls in the trailer and the 2 older kids ride their own bikes.  (Now by some standards, we are already considered cruel parents for making our 9 year old and 7 year old ride their bikes 6 miles round trip and swim 1 1/2 to 2 hours in between.)  For some time (and by this I mean weeks)  Jonas has made the biking a bit unpleasant with all of his whining and complaining.  "It's too hard!"  "My legs are so tired!"  "My legs hurt!"  "I can't do it!"  (Of course this is all said in a rather unpleasant voice.)  We tolerated it for a short time and then became frustrated with him and stopped being so nice about it.  "What's the problem Jonas?"  "If you would just change your bad attitude, you would be fine!"  "Samantha and Robbie are doing fine - stop complaining!!!  (My nephew rides over with us too.)  And finally, on one particular day where I was completely fed up, I told Jonas (in a rather angry tone) to just turn around and go home so I wouldn't have to listen to him anymore.  (Hopefully, no one will report me to child services.)

Now on this bike ride, there is a place where Jonas seemed to have fun.  We ride past one of the signs that measures the speed of the passing cars (and bikes).  So, we always make it a point to see how fast we can go and watch the speed flash up on the screen.  This led to the thought that maybe if Jonas had a speedometer on his bike, he might be a little happier doing all of this bike riding.  So on Monday we got speedometers for the kids bikes.  As Shawn was attaching the speedometer to Jonas' bike, he discovered that his front brake was stuck on.  We checked this a couple of times, but yep, it definitely was on permanent braking.  We felt so bad!  The poor kid has been doing all of his riding with the brake on!  No wonder it was so hard and made his legs hurt, and made him so tired!  Oh, the guilt we felt!  The very next morning, (after Shawn fixed the problem) he rode great and kept up with no problem.  We have apologized for our cruelty and tried to make him feel better by telling him how much stronger he is for having to work so hard.  (He doesn't seem to be buying it.)  But we are somewhat relieved to know that, at least in this instance, it wasn't just his bad attitude that kept him from accomplishing what we knew he could do.  Although, it doesn't make us feel any better for being so mean about it.