Wednesday, July 15, 2009 10:25 PM CDT
COLUMN: Next time you see a spare tricycle, just hop right on; you'll be OK
By PENNY WEAVER, News Editor
pweaver@jg-tc.com
I’m not sure what it says about me, but it seems like I keep learning and re-learning the most important lessons in life from the under-age-10 set.
Take my 5-year-old niece Olivia, for example.
Several of us in my family, including five out of my eight nieces and nephews, gathered at my sister’s house near Pekin last weekend for a visit. Finding enough bicycles and other modes of transportation for all the kids was a challenge.
Since it was their house, Stephanie, 6 1/2, and Tyler, 3 1/2, both had bicycles of the right size. My oldest nephew, Danny, 9 1/2, is big enough already to ride a grown-up’s bike. Stephanie has an extra girls’ bicycle, so either Isabel, 7, or Olivia, 5, could take that.
Luckily, there was a scooter and a tricycle to offer other ready-to-roll wheels, so the whole herd could be on the move at once.
It was quite a sight when Danny took off on the tricycle. That’s almost as funny as if any grownup tried to do it.
Then Olivia — a.k.a. Livvy — took off on the tricycle, her too-big-for-it legs popping up and down on that bright red little kid’s set of wheels.
As she was coming back toward the house, riding on a blacktop kind of street, she crashed; I heard it, rather than saw it.
She’d barely landed when she called out to us, “I’m OK!”
She got right back on and pedaled away, just as fast, and this time I did see it when she wrecked again.
“I’m still OK!” she assured us, yelling out almost before she hit the pavement. She stood up in a hurry, brushed off her bare legs, and got right back on.
Now, we’ve all heard that saying about getting on that horse again after you get bucked off, but that’s about the best demonstration I’ve seen yet of that principle.
And Livvy’s 5. Lord knows what she’ll teach me by the time she’s a teenager.
After a quick lunch — fried bologna is a favorite for Danny, Isabel and Livvy, thanks to their dad — we all headed for the nearby small lake and its quaint little beach. It’s kind of like Lake Shelbyville’s stretch of sand near Ninth Street: The geese like it, too, and you know what they leave behind.
Still, aside from watching where we stepped, we had the place to ourselves and the kids enjoyed splashing around.
It still amazes me how most kids I know are so easily amused and occupied, yet somehow by the time we’re all teenagers and then adults, many people are “bored” all the time.
Personally, I’m easily amused — and again, I’m not sure what it says about me, but there you have it.
Danny discovered one of those foam “noodles” that are for play in the pool or at the beach, and this one had a hole in the center from one end to the other. So, naturally, he was soon dipping it into the lake, then blowing into one end to shoot water out the other end.
That provided at least an hour of amusement, or aggravation, depending on the end of the toy at which you found yourself.
Stephanie would hold one end of the foam, she and Danny would hold it under the water to fill it up, and while Steph held the “business end” of the toy up in the air and yelled, “Fire!”, Danny blew into the other end and sent a burst of water shooting out ...
... usually toward Aunt Penny. Sometimes it’s tough being the overgrown 12-year-old of the bunch.
All the kids soon discovered a small plastic slide, like one that toddlers might use in their back yard. Not content to keep it on the beach, they lugged it into the water and got in line behind it to slide, one after the other, from the top down beneath the cold lake surface.
Big deal, you say? Apparently! One after another, again and again and again, they stood on top of the slide, its handles barely sticking out of the water, and slid down into the water as if this was the greatest invention since fruit rollups.
Before long, they stood on top of the little slide and jumped into the water, trying to land on a blow-up floating mat that I held there, an even more appealing activity, it seems.
Who needs an XBox? Or a Didj, or a LeapFrog, or whatever the younger set favors these days?
Back from the beach, the real fun began. The girls got out a makeup kit and soon they were doing faces, fingernails and toenails. Danny and Tyler didn’t dodge the girly session — I think Danny ended up with dark hot pink fingernails and lavender toenails, and Tyler with something similar.
Their uncle seemed abhorred, but the boys just laughed right along with the girls.
What’s so wonderful about children is that they’re not jaded. They don’t know — at least until they’re 5 — that boys aren’t “supposed” to wear nail polish. They don’t mind being 5 and hopping on a 2-year-old’s tricycle and taking off.
They just know they’re having fun.
I hate it that most of us adults lose that inner child. I don’t mean childishness — although I can’t claim to never be childish, I admit — but just that child-like sense of humor and simplicity of enjoying little things.
Instead of automatically jumping up and trying again when we fall or fail, we learn to fear falling again. I suppose that’s just self-preservation, but sometimes it keeps us from achieving, or simply from having some fun.
I say, dignity is overrated. Let’s set aside our grown-upness sometimes and just play.
I’m hoping none of our photographers are around the next time I’m out for a walk and I see a tricycle, just sitting there, calling my name.
But if I get a cramp trying to pedal, or if I fall, or if someone laughs at the ridiculous spectacle I make of myself, I know what to say.
“I’m OK!”
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acidburn wrote on Jul 16, 2009 8:29 AM:
It's like leaves, show a leaf to a group of 4 year old and they will all say, rather excitedly, that's a leaf, show the same leaf to a group of 10 year olds and they will all say, that just a dumb leaf. We all lose the child in us very early. "