Cycles

Yesterday, Mabel gave me a tiny crumb of hope for the human race. Or at least for the portion of human race that we're raising in this house. She was spontaneously thoughtful.

But first, I'll tell you about the walk home from school.

When Dash started at the elementary school, Mabel was almost three. His dad brings him to school most mornings, but Mabel and I walk up to collect him at 3:20 every day, unless the weather's horrible. This meant that Mabel would be in the stroller, post-nap, and I would be pushing. Sometimes she'd hop out and run, and on the way home Dash would perch himself on the front till I yelled at him, and thus not so beatifically, we'd finally get all the way home again. I think I blogged about my frustrations.

When he went back to school this year, with Mabel now the proud owner of two bicycles and a scooter, I started encouraging her to bike to school sometimes. It worked pretty well, though we didn't abandon the stroller entirely. When she biked I'd end up breaking my back to push her halfway home up the slight incline you wouldn't even notice without a bike. Some days she was unhelpfully naked at 3:00 and it was as much as I could do to stuff her into her wheeled throne, put a blanket over her, and throw some clothes in the basket for the point when she was ready to emerge into the public gaze.

Since Christmas, though, she's been biking pretty consistently and the stroller has stayed at home. We took things up a notch last week, when both children suddenly looked too big for their bicycles at the same time - and with Dash's birthday coming up, we decided it was time to buy him a new one and let Mabel inherit his old one. Since the old one is purple, she was happy. Dash got a shiny new big bike and is looking terribly large and moving awfully fast all of a sudden.

And he's started riding his bike to school. Mabel doesn't need a push any more, and is learning to use the brakes - rather than her feet - going downhill too. So now, my view of the daily commute looks increasingly like this (below this paragraph that keeps getting longer), and I'm going to have to unearth - and inflate the tyres on - my own bike if I don't want to have to run home every day. (Which would be good for me, but my stupid foot is still a little sore* and I'm not dressed for running at that time of day.)

And now the nice bit. On the way to school yesterday Mabel was stuck cycling slowly behind a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. She didn't pass the woman out, and soon stopped to wait for me. I told her I liked that she'd not barged past, and said she could use her bell or say excuse me if she wanted to get by.

"I didn't want to ring my bell in case it scared the baby," she said to me.

The clouds parted and angels sang. My little tyrant, thinking of someone else? Maybe, just maybe, the extreme self-centredness is just a phase. (I've always been fairly sure it was, but I'm an optimist and there's always the chance that you're the one raising Genghis Khan.)

The way we're doing it, the Chinese-water-torture drip, drip, drip, keep-telling-them-about-how-to-behave-nicely, observe-and-praise-the-good-behaviour: it does eventually penetrate, and just when you're starting to think you should maybe have been spanking them soundly on a daily basis and twice on Sundays, they surprise you. Maybe, in time, she'll turn out to be a decent member of civilization. Butterfly, chrysalis, yada yada; springtime metaphors abound. Sigh.

*Sore but improving. Apparently what I should have done to fix it was not bring it to the doctor but simply blog about it. I might escape the nun shoes for a while yet.