Biking To School

We live about fifteen blocks from where our kids go to school -- just long enough to justify taking the bus in the winter, but a nice walk when it's warm out. But ever since the almost-four-year-old starting riding a bike (no training wheels, thanks to the year he spent practicing balancing with his Like-A-Bike), we've been letting the boys ride bikes to school, usually with Dad trailing behind carrying lunch boxes and laptop. But this morning I took my bike too, and we left a few minutes early so that we could detour through Prospect Park. It's an absolutely peak spring morning here, and so we had a lovely tour through the Park, and then rode down the broad sidewalks on 3rd Street, one of the most beautiful streets in the entire city. Getting two young kids off to school can be a major ordeal, particularly in the winter, but this turned the whole experience into something completely fun, for all of us.

As I get older, I find the winters getting harder and harder to tolerate, not just the lack of sunlight, but just as much the lack of green. This winter I started having extended fantasies about moving to Marin County. But mornings like this one make me feel like we're in the exact right place, and lucky to be there.

Comments

[E.]

I hear you on the sunlight and greenery thing.

Wife and I are transplants from Boston to Chapel Hill, NC. Helps on the green front: spring starts a little earlier, fall lasts a little longer, and winter is nice and short. Summer, of course, is pretty brutal, and we still have the lack of sunlight/mole people thing going all winter.

Brooklyn is awfully nice, though, and we do gaze longingly to the north, particularly during your snow days in the winter.

[Michael]

Ah, nothing like the feeling of a stroll through a brilliant urban park on a summer's day. If you do ever leave New York, however, San Francisco would make for a much nicer transition to better weather than Marin County. Live in the Mission and keep all the good things about a city without the bitter cold.

[Aaron]

Yes.

Even our three-days-a-week bike ride to daycare through the gritty, smelly Gowanus section makes me feel the same way.

[wow power leveling]

where is my bicycle^^

i miss it very much

[Leslie Crawford]

Steven, I'm not sure how to send you a personal email (that is, not as a posting here), but wondering if you'd be available for a brief phone interview for an article I'm writing for BabyCenter on children and humor (I'm interested in what happens neurochemically when people laugh).
Thanks,
Leslie

[Kare Anderson]

Steven
Well if you and yoru family do finally give in and move to Marin (we have three beaches within 10 minutes)some decent schools and more certifiably eccentric characters and, well, the winter is mild and the Fall is better than the Summer