mathmom's blog

One of the best parts of bike riding is actually going someplace (instead of just riding around the neighborhood).  So today we packed up our water bottles and books (because you shouldn't go anywhere without a book) and rode to the neighborhood park. This was complicated by the fact that Ella is a proficient bike rider, Amanda is adequate (although she has trouble staying on her side of the road and tends to stop often to pick up pieces of fluff and feathers on the sides of the road) and Luke is just beginning.  Ella and Amanda were pretty good about waiting for Luke and me, but Luke is not really sure about his brakes yet, and not really good about going up hills yet, so we had to walk up and down the steepest hills. Still, we got to the park and set the girls' bikes up in the bike rack.  Luke rode around the playground for a while.  I only had to remind him once that the one of the first rules for riding a bike was, "don't run into babies!" Ella got out her

Luke wanted to make a recipe from the recipe book his grandma gave him, so we made a fruit and granola parfait. We changed the strawberries to grapes and left out the pumpkin seeds, but otherwise we made it as written.  Luke says it's pretty good!

Friday was the "Mother's tea" at Amanda's school.  All the kids wrote little essays about their mothers (including details like "my mom's favorite TV show is the news" and "My mom is 40 years old.")  Amanda wrote that she wanted to go on a bike ride with just her mom, but that I couldn't leave Luke at the house alone so I couldn't go. So today while Luke was out on a ride with Daddy, I went out with Amanda.  The squeaky wheel gets some grease, I suppose.  Maybe asking indirectly is better than asking directly---it's easier to say yes.

We noticed a few weeks ago that Ella's knees were knocking against the handlebars of her bike (well, not quite, but almost).  So today we went to the bike store and picked out a new one, a HUGE purple bike, just right for tooling around the neighborhood on.  We also got water bottles, a little "bike purse", and a kickstand for Luke's bike, since he asked us to remove the training wheels and to give him a kickstand.  He's been riding the "strider" bike pretty well for a while, and almost balancing on his own bike, but we wanted to wait until he was ready. Well, we got home from the bike store and every few seconds Luke was trying to open the kickstand.  He really wanted to put it on.  "You can have the kickstand after you learn to ride without training wheels," we told him.  So, of course, he insisted even more that he wanted to take the training wheels off immediately. Michael got his tools and took off the training wheels and went into th

How many violists does it take to hold a concert? More than thirty! There was a great concert with lots and lots of violas. My favorite piece was the "Ride of the viola valkyries" played by 8 violas.  They also invited violists from the audience (who had registered in advance) to play. Apparently when they tried this in california they got over 100 participants.  We had 38, which was still an impressive sound. My favorite joke: Why are viola jokes so short?  So violinists can remember them.