Why my husband is cooler than yours

Junior has been wanting to ride on the bike trail with me, so today we decided to give it a whirl. By "ride", however, he means he will scoot on his scooter, and I will ride my bike. Images of myself toppling over as I try to make like a hummingbird and pedal in place surfaced, but I was willing to give it a go because he was excited (well, willing) about the idea. In my brilliance then, I thought to myself, Maybe he'll want to ride his bike on the bike trail, too. Maybe I should load his bike in the van, just in case.

Myself should keep her brilliant ideas to herself.

Here's how our little outing went.

1. Wrestle the seat of our minivan down (stow'n'go seating, my ass)

(In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that the problem wasn't actually with the seat or the stowing process but with my failure to slide the seat into the proper position before attempting to stow it. Thank goodness my 16 year old son came out before my head exploded and took the 7.2 seconds it took him to figure out the problem and fold down the seat.)

2. Wrestle my bike into the van. (sorry, no pictures. I didn't realize it was going to be a blog-worthy -- in my mind, anyway --story at the time)

3. Wrestle Junior's bike into the van.

4. Decide to go by the gas station and air up Junior's tires.

5. Drive right past the gas station.

6. Curse (quietly, so he can't hear me over the Sponge Bob video rotting his brain)

7. Circle back.

8. Wrestle his bike, which has become determinedly entangled in mine, out of the van.

9. Air up tires.

10. #8, in reverse.

11. Arrive at bike trail. He only wants to ride his scooter (which at least went easily into the car).

12. He rides his scooter about 10 feet and decides he'd rather run. I start to take the scooter back to the car.

13. No, he'd rather scoot.

14. Run.

15. Scoot.

16. "Why aren't you running, Mommy? Run along with me!"

a) because I ran 5 miles before you got out of bed

b) because you aren't scooting fast enough that I have to run yet

17. Scoot about 100 feet.

18. He decides he'd rather run. "Can you carry my scooter?"


Can you say "SUCKER"? And I looked much cuter in my mind than in this picture.

19. We run/walk the rest of the way back, me carrying the scooter AND his helmet.

20. As we walk, he holds my hand and keeps squeezing it. OK, I've been laughingly annoyed about this experience all day long, but my heart is melting right now remembering this. It was a very sweet moment worth all of the frustration.

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P.S. Entirely unrelated. I was at St. Louis Bread Co. (Panera if you don't live in the St. Louis area) this evening. I was just there to drink a soda and use their wi-fi until Jocko was finished with the youth service at church, but I was struck by how good it smelled. I had just eaten dinner (and a candy bar. This, after barely succeeding in cramming my ass into a pair of size 10 pants at Target. Not pretty. I blamed myself, then realized/decided that they were designed for a Jr. sized girl.) and wasn't hungry at all, but I still wanted to eat something there (I didn't). Which got me thinking. You know how people say you could gain weight just from the smell of food?

Smellories = calories inhaled through the nose.