play outside more

I just took my Number One Daughter’s abandoned bike out wearing my Number One Son’s bike helmet. Oh my god, I am just trembling now, from a combination of exaustion and excitement.

The thing is, I haven’t been on a bike in, oh, thirty years and when I did last ride a bike it was a one speed, back-pedal brake bike, which gives you an idea of how long ago and low tech it was.

I wonder how you change gears on a bike and how much difference it makes? I have no idea.

I went once around the block. On hills I wheeled. Downhills I mean. It was both a lot of effort going up those hills and almost frightening how little effort it was on the level. It had a tendency to go much, much faster than I liked. I wobbled all over the road, particularly when starting, when each foot’s first pedel sent me veering two feet to either side. I guess I can ride a bike still. Scared me, though.

It was most enjoyable!

I must have had the neighbours in stitches.

Yesterday night an brisk exercise walk around the lake devolved happily into a play session. Number Two Daughter and I took a side excursion to the playground and swang, stopped to watch the deer feeding on the side of the road, climbed to the waterfall and did some running on the last hill.

She was beautiful running, a coltish fourteen with her long hair flapping, still uncivilized enough to want to run because there is a long sward of open grass.

We came home an hour late. Coming home late is one of the hallmarks of a satisfactory play session. If we had also come home grubby it would have counted as an ideal play session but the ground is still barely thawing so we didn’t do any sprawling in the grass.

On my way up the stairs yesterday evening I noticed that I was tired. It was not the oh-god-keep-going tiredness that adulthood and especially parenting is prone to. It was the ready to drop bonelessly, relaxed from a good workout tiredness that was once so familiar when I was a kid.

This was a good play session. I’m happy.

One more play session to go and I have acheived this goal.

It’s getting warm enough to go out again! It was actually above freezing for awhile today. Of course there were no sidewalks yet but so nice for me to be coaxed into taking a walk by the blissfully warm weather!

Soon! I’m thinking about how nice it would be to take a ball outside and play with that. The snow and sheet ice on the field was only about four inches thick because they had ploughed it this winter. That means within another three or four weeks we might have soggy wet grass! Oooh! I’m excited. And only two weeks after that we might have ground hard enough to run on and crocuses coming out.

Spring begins in a week. The thaw will be hard on its heels.

Rotten sheet ice!

Every time the sidewalks start to clear a bit we get a thaw and they become skating rinks. There is now a five inch thick layer of ice on our path from the front porch to the door. It is basically level with the porch. The sidewalks are no better. It is going to take a lot of melting to clear this little lot away. I doubt I will see pavement again before March.

But at least there are sidewalks so I don’t have to play chicken with the cars in the narrow gorges between snowbanks which pass for roads around here.

It’s not that I mind the cold – I don’t. Nor that I don’t like playing in the snow. It’s the blasted sidewalks. Everwhere I go is just sheet ice, with a layer of powder snow on top of that. All I can do is mince along carefully…

My husband’s bus couldn’t get up the hill on Friday because of the ice on the road so he arrived uptown too late to make his connection and had to walk five blocks to work. He fell down twice.

I kinda feel like I’m not getting any exercise when I get out if it takes me ten minutes to walk a single block, and it’s not so much fun either.

Today I went to the library. Round about three o’clock I glanced at the clock, and spur of the moment decided I would do so. The weather was gorgeous out, only about four degrees below freezing and squirrels running across the road on overhead wires since they probably couldn’t safely navigate over the snow banks on either side of the road which make ramparts around here in the winter.

I moseyed around the library until I had collected an armload of books and then I wandered home, hurrying because my stomach was making hopeful gurgles and I was starting to fantasize about fried vegetables and brown-rice-n-beans.

This was definitely not a play outside session. It was an errand, really, albeit one whose primary purpose was self-indulgence. However it had the feel of a good play session. No worry about the time, no sense that if I didn’t make it out Thursday afternoon I wouldn’t be able to go at all. It was nice having time so unstructured.

Should I count crossing the lake or not? Last weekend I went out for my walks dutifully, although it was -27* and -29* (degrees below zero). I bundled up well with long winter underwear and was quite cozy trudging along. The only part of me that didn’t have double layers were my nose and mouth and eyes. I couldn’t cover my eyes at all or I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t cover my nose and mouth or my glasses fogged up and I was blind.

Anyway, Lily Lake was frozen hard, with skaters on it, and I decided instead of walking around the lake I would walk across it and then around the bottom and back retracing the way I started, which made my route longer.

The thing about crossing the lake on the ice is that it frightened me witless. If the ice broke and I had fallen through I would have probably been dead within a couple of minutes. You really don’t last long. And as I walked along I had to step on the cracks in the ice and every now and again there was a deep low animal groaning from the heaving sheets as they ground against each other…

I was bloody terrified, so I did it twice.

Oh, and I am a most practical person, you know. Yeah, there were cracks and it was groaning, but they had also driven a pick-up truck with a snow plough on it all over it to clear the snow for the skating. I knew darn well that there was no danger, but my poor terrifed tummy didn’t believe it at all.

Does this count as playing outside? Almost. But no. All I did was trudge, frosting the (acrylic) fur on my hood with white ice from my breath. I walked. And walking, despite it being somewhere new and a foolishly hair-raising experience, does not count as playing outside.

I still have to come up with two more playing sessions. This is going to be hard. Our sled was swiped (turned out not to be in the cellar) and I can no longer budget for a trip to the pool.

Good news: I should have time for the playing sessions easily in a week or so. If only I had snow pants like I did when I was a kid. Then I could go sledding without the sled.

I really want to get outside with our 4 year old and play in the snow more, but it has been ridiculously cold lately. I don’t know if I’ll be able to work on this goal anytime soon…

I need to have two more play sessions to consider this goal complete. One of them, I hope will involve sledding but I may have to buy a new toboggan to do that. The toboggan is apparently in the cellar and the cellar door is frozen shut.

Another thing I would really like to do is go swimming. But that is a huge endeavour and a big break in my routine. I have a swimsuit, if the spandex in it hasn’t perished. I think I know where my padlock and key is, for the locker room. But… that is as far as I have got on this possible goal. I am still thinking about it. I am not sure if going to the pool would be more stressful than it would be fun. It would certainly be expensive. Just one dip in the pool costs as much as going out to the movies, and I never do that any more because the cost is so high.

If I do go to the pool I would have to plan it carefully the evening before. I was thinking a Tuesday, but not next Tuesday because that is slated for a grocery run.

It started as my usual brisk half hour walk around the lower lake. But Number Two Daughter was with me and she wanted to follow the brook up into the woods by the mossy hollow under the cliff. Then she wanted to know where the brook originated and wasn’t contented with me telling her, so we had to follow it willy nilly through brush, half frozen mud, slippery rocks and interesting boggy bits. I only got my sneakers sodden when a log I was attempting to use to cross the water disintegrated underneath me and one of my sneakers wasn’t completely wet because part of the heel stayed on the bank.

Once the source of the creek was discovered – the upper lake, just as I had told her- we went on to the playground where I swung for a little bit. I had brought my skipping rope so we tried that out too and proved that we were both very poor skippers. I managed six in a row when I was jumping with both feet at the same time, so you see I am not exaggerating with the word “poor” in this context!

And then we ambled our way back down to the lower lake and home again. The lake had cat ice on it and she took great pleasure in alarming me by breaking it with her feet and sitting on the dock and leaning in so she could see how strong it was before she broke it, but of course it was only me who got my feet soaked.

The last bit of playing we did was when I got her to climb onto the gate at the park entrance and I swung it open and closed with her as a passenger.

So that was my latest and sixth play session.