Category: Family Stuff

By way of special requests for more pictures…

I had Friday off of work, so Liz and I decided to take the kids over to Petroglyph National Monument to show them the ancient graffiti all over the volcanic rocks on the west side of the Rio Grand in Albuquerque.  The kids had a blast playing mountain goat on the large rocks.

I also got talked into going with the scouts on an overnight backpacking trip as Isaac’s hiking buddy this weekend.  The plan was to hike in two miles, eat and sleep, them hike to the top of the canyon to the wreckage of a TWA airline that crashed into the mountain in the 1950s before heading back to the trailhead.  Unlike almost every other scout trip I’ve gone on, this one went mostly to plan.

Or ward organized a camp out this last weekend.  I’m not really in a state of mind where hanging out with a million noisy kids and a bunch of adults I don’t really know sounds like fun, but we had agreed to go and keep another family company, so after work Friday we packed up a bunch of crap and drove the 20 minutes to the camp ground.  Luckily for me, the family we were to spend the weekend with had similar ideas to mine, and had selected a site well off the beaten path and away from the main population.

Michael ran wild in a large pack of kids the whole time, enjoying the danger associated with being “off leash.” Isaac spent most of his time with a friend taking apart a rather large fallen ponderosa pine with a couple of hatchets.   I spent the day with our friend who liked crowds about as much as I do, and the evening watching a fire and the night sky in relative quiet and peace.  Liz hung out with her friend and talked homeschooling, and Sydney stayed home to sleep off a headache.  Not a bad weekend overall.

Liz and I recently observed our 19th anniversary.   It’s hard to believe she’s put up with me that long, but she continues happy in her delusions.  Why should I undeceive her?  What a wonderful woman!  I’m more in love with her now than I was back then, and I would never have believed you if you told me then it was possible.

We eat a lot of bacon.  About the only foodstuff that has more general ability for making food taste better is butter (the real stuff…  there hasn’t been a stick of margarine in our house in years), and we eat a lot of that too.  Bacon makes eggs infinitely more appealing when you’ve already eaten half a dozen in the last day or two.  Bacon added to paté makes liver almost tasty.  Popcorn popped in bacon grease with a little sea salt is amazing.  Wrap a date in bacon and bake it, and you have an amazing appetizer.  Then there’s bacon wrapped and creme-cheese stuffed jalapeño, bacon wrapped scallops, bacon bits on salad, bacon burgers, bacon, bacon, bacon.  We like bacon.

We’ve become serious enough bacon snobs that we’ve developed an almost fail-proof way to fully render the bacon without burning it or smoking the grease.  I discovered while I was living in a hotel for several months that the electric skillet I cooked almost all my food in was perfect for keeping the temperature just hot enough to fully crisp up the bacon without smoking the fat.  Set for 350 degrees with a little grease from the last batch in the bottom of the pan to get things started, the skillet can almost be ignored until the bacon is done, then it comes out crispy and perfect.   After taking the delicious little strips of bacony goodness out of the grease, I let the grease cool slightly and filter it through a paper towel into a mason jar for use in any number of other foods.  We can’t let that precious bacon-flavored fat go to waste, now can we?

To give you an idea for how much we like bacon, we often cook the bacon faster than we can reasonably use up the resulting grease even while liberally applying it to eggs, vegetables, or whatever else needs the kind of help that can only be provided by delicious fat.  Recently, I ended up with a full quart jar of bacon grease in the fridge with no real expectation I would be able to use it up before another came in behind it.  With so much to spare, I decided to try something new.  I went to the store, bought a bunch of sweet potatoes, and came home to try making sweet potato chips deep fried in bacon grease.   I scraped the grease into my trusty skillet set for 350 degrees before turning to my stash of sweet potatoes.   After peeling the skin off, I ran a couple of them through my food processor to cut them into slices a little less than 1/8th of an inch thick and sent them into the hot oil.

After coming out of the fryer, a little sea salt and complete cooling produced rather ugly looking but very tasty and crunchy chips.  Because I’m not supposed to eat a lot of carbs from things like grains and potatoes, I miss the crunch of crackers or the crust of a French baguette.  Having a handful of sweet potato chips to fill that void is a godsend.   Having a slight taste of bacon to enhance the flavor of the sweet potato is even better.   I can only imagine what it would taste like to do this with potatoes.   One note is that it took quite a while before the water had cooked off enough for the final result to come out crispy.  In fact, it took about 20-25 minutes, so I don’t recommend starting something like this if you are in a hurry.  In my case, I didn’t have much else going on that night, so it didn’t really matter how long it took.  In the end, I cooked up about 10 lbs of sweet potatoes and got a large bag of chips out of the deal.

So, now that we’ve established just how much we like bacon around here, I have to say that we’re kind of picky about it.  If Oscar Meyer makes it, if it was wet cured with liquid smoke, or if it doesn’t look and smell like it was dry-smoked in a real smoke-house, I’m not likely to eat it if I have any alternatives.  If the choice is cheap bacon or a box of cereal and skim milk — the cheap bacon wins every time, but that’s about where I draw the line.   Unfortunately, the trouble with good bacon is that it’s expensive.  However, I’ve never let that get in the way of good food, and this is no exception.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

To help manage costs we used to purchase and butcher a pig semi-regularly and make bacon from the belly while the rest of the critter found its way into sausage, chops, roasts, lard, and whatnot.   Because of this I have enough bacon cure in the pantry to process almost another 200 lbs of bacon, but don’t have pigs to use it on.  I doubt my neighbors here in the suburbs would be all that thrilled with me slaughtering a pig in the front yard.  Processing an animal in the garage is out of the question too since I can barely walk through there; and the back yard is over 50% filled by the trampoline and the rest with other stuff, so there’s no way I could find the space I’d need there.   In the past, I’ve looked for fresh porkbelly in meat markets and grocery stores without success because they either don’t have it or it costs more than decent bacon.

Last week, however, I happened to be walking through a meat section in a grocery store and came across a pile of fresh, trimmed, porkbellies for less than $2.00 a pound.  Without asking Liz if the grocery budget had the latitude I bought a 10lb slab to check the quality.   It was excellent, and it’s now in the fridge curing.  I’ll move it to the smoker tomorrow morning.  As soon as this one comes out of the fridge to smoke I’ll probably go back and buy out what’s left.    Good thing we only bought half a cow this year, I’m going to need room in the freezer for pig after all.  Mmmm…  Bacon!

What do you get when a formally trained engineer/scientist and a classically trained pianist/liberal arts genius work together?  Sounds like a lead up to some kind of joke, right?  Or maybe you’re thinking this is some reference to my kids.  Neither are right.   While my kids would be a logical and technically correct answer, that isn’t the one I’m looking for.  When it comes down to it, this reference is about a project in the early stages of development.  You see, Liz and I are about to embark on a project that, if successful, will answer this question in the form of an unusual and comprehensive approach to math education.

For most of the last decade we’ve homeschooled or kids.  Moving frequently, mixed with the difficulty in tailoring public education to the individual needs of our kids, has meant that homeschooling was the simplest and likely most productive route.  However, one area that has been a constant source of frustration as Liz has tried different approaches has been how and when to teach math in such a way that it isn’t pure drudgery for both her and the kids.  We’ve tried several different curricula, and Liz has had significant heartburn with each she’s looked at.  One does a decent job with one aspect, another with another, but none of them has ever come close to teaching the subject in a manner consistent with our teaching and learning philosophy.  After informally surveying several friends, I’ve become convinced that the frustration extends well beyond me and my household.  There is demand, even if it’s only in a small market segment.

Given that there is room for a new approach to math education, one might wonder what might possibly make me believe that Liz and I would be a plausible source for a solution.  While I have extensive math in my background as an electrical engineer and applied physicist, I am not a mathematician.  Nor am I a professional educator.  Liz would seem similarly unqualified on the surface.  She has had no formal math education beyond college algebra, little experience with the kind of traditional applied math the education system insists is most important (the venerable STEM that is supposed to solve society’s ills), and all of her formal training as an educator revolves around either homeschooling or music.  So, why then would we consider ourselves qualified to undertake this challenge?

First, I claim our status as outsiders makes us better qualified to identify the limitations of the currently available system without some of the self confirming biases of those who built the current method.  Granted, we have our own biases, but the tendency of my most prominent bias to question the establishment has proven highly useful in my professional life as it has forced introspective reevaluation of many cherished “truths” held by whatever community I am called on to consult for at the moment.  When a cherished belief or preference for doing something has merit, questioning it can help clarify why it is the right way to do business and assist in gathering support from both the practitioners (teachers in the current context) and the recipients (students).  When an idea or approach lacks merit, questioning can lead to clearing the path for something better.  I believe Liz and I are in a position to test and evaluate teaching methods and content without being bound or blinded by the conventions of the education industry.

The second reason I think Liz and I can produce something useful is exactly because we are so different both from each other and from the crowd that typically writes math curricula.  If the two of use can come to consensus on what and how to lead someone through understanding and applying critical quantitative reasoning concepts the odds are pretty good that we’ve covered the concerns of a large portion of the population segment who are struggling with currently available resources.  Both of us have varying ways of approaching problems, explaining concepts, and shaping messages.

So, there you have it, Liz and I are seriously working on a new approach to teaching math.  Who knows how far it will go, but for now it’s certain to keep us busy.

By this point in my role as a parent, I thought I’d told all the tellable stories to my kids.  In fact, they know them so well that they tend to try to tell them for me when we meet someone new.  However, I was surprised yesterday to discover one that Sydney, at least, hadn’t heard.  We were talking with some family friends and the subject of Sydney locking her keys in the car when she went to fill up the tank came up.  Naturally, that spurred a memory and a resulting story that I assumed my family had already heard, but one I knew would be new to this particular group of friends.  As I launched into the narrative, the look on Sydney’s face told me she’d never heard this particular story before. Since I apparently haven’t been all that prolific in sharing this one, I figured I might as well write it down before I forget it and it is lost to history.

When I was 16, I purchased a 1979 Cadillac Coupe De Ville from my older sister who had previously purchased it from a rather eccentric artist friend of my father’s.  To give you some idea for how nice of a vehicle this beast was, I’ll share what I know of it’s origin story.  Steve Paschal, my father’s artist friend, was something of a gypsy painter who didn’t stay anywhere very long.  Somehow or another, he had landed in Utah and made friends with my father who has a habit of making friends with a wide array of people.  After a few years (I think about three) Steve got itchy to move again and started making plans to move his family to Hong Kong.  Among the possessions he needed to liquidate before leaving was his wife’s Cadillac – an enormous beast of a vehicle that was painted banana yellow, drank gas like a thirsty camel drinks water, and had been the victim of some variety of major accident (I believe with a telephone pole) that smashed the hinge of the passenger-side door.  The headliner was falling down, it burned oil like crazy, and about the only equipment in the dash-board that worked reliably was an old 8-track player (I didn’t own any 8-track tapes though).  The air-adjustable shocks were shot, and the tires were about as bald and rotten as you can get while still holding air.  It was longer than a long-bed pickup truck, and when I opened both doors the car took up three full parking spots

A week before leaving for Hong Kong, Steve offered this car to my sister and her husband for $200.  They didn’t have $200.  A little while later, he offered it to her for $100.  They didn’t have $100.  Just before leaving, Steve asked her how much she did have.  I think the answer was something like $25.  It was worth about that much.  While it was a broken-down old beast, my sister still drove it for a while before deciding they didn’t need it anymore, and they sold it to me for $100.  At this point my sister was pregnant with their first child, and I believe she and her husband figured they could make due with one car to save on expenses.

Their other car (a GMC S-15 small pickup) wasn’t the most reliable car on the market either.  It was much newer than the Cadillac, but had experienced a rather hard life, having been used by a brick-mason in it’s prior employment.  By the time this story started, it had already required a new clutch and starter, tires, and many of the gauges in the dash-board didn’t work — including the gas gauge.  Not long after they sold me the Cadillac, their truck developed a rather bad habit of not starting randomly.  We believed the relatively new starter (a rebuild) was at fault.  Unfortunately, having spent my $100 on groceries and gas, my sister didn’t have money to take this new trouble to a mechanic, so the solution was to get out of the truck, get it rolling, slip it into gear, and pop the clutch to get the engine turning.

The only problem with this scenario was that getting a truck rolling (even the small variety that this thing represented) isn’t awesomely easy for anyone and just about impossible for a woman who was 8 months pregnant.  After consulting together as a family, we decided the best option for the time being was to trade my sister the Cadillac for their unreliable truck.  Overall, I didn’t mind the trade.  I preferred their relatively newer 4×4 to my massive goober-mobile anyway, and I was pretty successful at finding places to park where it was a down-hill push to get it started just in case the starter decided randomly to act up.

One caveat I was given when I took over the truck was that I needed to reset the gas-gauge every time I filled up the tank, and that I needed to get gas before something like 240 miles.  This was the way I managed fuel in my Caddy, so I wasn’t particularly concerned.  I quite happily drove my sister’s truck for the next week or so without major incident (beyond the drama of starting it the two out of three times that the starter wouldn’t work).  However, that all came to an abrupt end one Saturday afternoon.

I was driving down a major road in my home-town, a mile or so from my work (McDonalds), and several miles from both mine and my sister’s homes and thinking I should probably stop and fill up the tank in the next 50 or so miles, when the engine began to stutter and stall.  My sister had neglected to tell me she didn’t have enough money to fill the tank completely the last time she fueled it.  I was out of gas.  I quickly pulled to the side of the road (the only place I could get out of traffic) only to realize both right-side tires were in deep gravel.  Not only that, but the road was busy enough that there was no way I could push it up onto the roadway and push-start it there.

Angry and frustrated, I walked a few blocks to the nearest gas-station, borrowed their loaner gas can, bought a gallon of gas, and walked back to the truck hoping the starter would work this time.  It didn’t.  Turning the key resulted in a whining sound, but no cranking of the engine which meant among other things that the mechanical fuel pump wasn’t pumping gas.  Even if I could get the truck rolling, it would take a while for the pump to push the gas through the lines and fill the bowl of the carb so the engine could start.  At this point, the immature 16 year old male in me took over and I locked the door and slammed it shut.  Almost immediately, but too late to do anything about it, I realized I had locked the keys in the truck.   To make matters worse, the ignition was on.  What little patience I had left evaporated.

At this point in history, cell phones were the domain of the affluent, and nobody in my family qualified for that club.  Instead, I walked to my work and ducked behind the counter to use their phone to call my sister.  The relief I felt when she answered the phone evaporated, however, when she told me she had a spare key but no way to get to me.  She suggested I call my dad and see if he could go pick up the key and bring it to me before hanging up.

A call to Dad resulted in even more frustration…  He was without a car.  At the time, my car was the family backup, my mom had the other car, and nobody knew when she’d be home or how to get a hold of her.  But wait…  there was an option.  My dad had bought an old moped a few years prior.  It wasn’t that far from my home to my work, so Dad decided he’d see if he could get it started and bring me the key.  Half an hour later, my frustrated father called back to say I’d have to find another way to get the key.

About this time, a lady I knew from church walked into the restaurant with her kids for a happy-meal.  I approached her, told her my situation, and asked if she could give me a ride when her kids were done eating.  She agreed and I thought I was out of the woods.  However, just getting the keys wasn’t good enough.  I’d need help pushing this stupid truck to a short dead-end dirt road a few yards from where it stopped where I could try to get it started using the method described above.  Unfortunately for me, Liz (who’s last name escapes me at the moment) was five-foot nothin’, slightly built, and just as pregnant as my sister.  I wouldn’t get much help from her, but at least I could get the keys.  True to her word, as soon as the kids had eaten and played for a minute on the indoor-playground she took me to my sister’s and brought me back to the stalled-out truck.

After retrieving the keys I made an effort to push the truck out of the gravel while Liz watched.  It failed miserably, and none of the passers-by offered to stop and help.  In desperation, I approached the door of the house adjacent to where I had parked and knocked.  At that point in time, knocking on a stranger’s door was about as pleasant to me as putting hot coals on my eyeballs, but I didn’t have much of a choice.  Gathering my courage, I rang the doorbell hoping for some burly man who would have the horsepower I needed.  I was sorely disappointed, however.  The only people home were a 10 year old boy and his younger sibling.  They may not be much help, but it was apparently all I was going to get.

As the four of us (me, a petite pregnant woman, and two kids) labored to get this truck off the side of the road and onto the only stretch of solid ground where I had any hope of getting it started, not a single person on that busy road stopped and offered to help.  I was getting angrier by the second.  Finally, after much struggle, we reached the dirt alleyway I had hoped for and I got the truck rolling fast enough to make an attempt.  I jumped in and dumped the clutch.  The truck shuddered as the tires skidded on the gravel and the engine turned over, but it didn’t start.  Twice more we got it rolling, only to meet with the same results.   I was running out of steam, and more importantly, I was almost out of alley.  There was a barbed-wire fence only about 50 feet from where we were, and turning the truck around pushing it uphill was out of the question.  I had one last chance to get this thing started and home.

About the time I was ready to step back out of the truck after this last failed attempt, I happened to look down and realized I had turned off the ignition at some point in the shenanigans.  I about lost it, muttering all kinds of inappropriate imprecations to myself, but I managed to collect myself enough to switch on the ignition.  After a last push, the engine caught and started about ten feet from the fence as I slammed one foot on the clutch and the other on both the brake and gas pedal to simultaneously keep the engine from stalling and the truck from running into the barbed-wire fence that was now immediately on my bumper.  The subsequent turn-around was more of a half-doughnut or power-turn as I aggressively and angrily sent rock and gravel flying…  I felt mildly better after that.   After thanking my hxelpers the best I could, I drove straight home.

At the time, I was flipping hamburgers for a living, and any one paycheck was rarely more than $200, but after this experience I made arrangements with a trusted mechanic to replace the ‘defective’ starter out of my own pocket.  $300 later, I had the truck back and was demanding my Cadillac in exchange.  Unfortunately, that $300 was ultimately wasted.  As it turned out the problem wasn’t with the starter.  When the clutch had been replaced, the ring-gear around the flywheel that engages the starter had been bumped and loosened.  These gears are only pressure-fitted, and this one had apparently slipped or stretched enough that if conditions were right the friction in the engine was enough that the gear would just slip and spin on the flywheel instead of turning the engine.  A few hits with a welder fixed the problem for a few cents worth of welding wire.

At this point, I’ve learned the value of cheap towing coverage.  Almost 15 years ago a very smart insurance agent told me that towing coverage would cost only about two dollars a month.  Courtesy of this and a handful of other similar experiences with unreliable vehicles convinced me that this small insurance policy was well worth the cost.  Were I to end up in this kind of a bind now, I’d pull out my handy cell phone and call up the tow-truck.  Problem solved, but no real story to tell.

It’s no secret that I’ve struggled greatly for most of the last year and a half.  Depression has gotten the better of me for a lot of that time and pains, difficulties, setbacks, and heartache that would have only been a mild irritant under normal circumstances have stacked up and thrown me well off balance — leaving me unstable.

Last Sunday, I was sitting in fast and testimony meeting listening to the traditional flow of shared testimony and experience with no intention of taking part in more than a strictly passive sense.  Sundays, in particular, have been very hard for me, and last Sunday was no exception.  All I wanted was to crawl in a hole and sleep until Monday.  The last thing on my mind was sharing anything with anyone.  However, what I want rarely had any bearing on what actually occurs, and this was no exception.  I spent several minutes convincing myself that the promoting I received was authentic, and a few more trying to rationalize ignoring it.  Ultimately, I submitted.

Generally speaking, I like talking to an audience, and have no issues sharing a message.  However, what I was prompted to say was something I didn’t want to share.  I didn’t want to air my feelings and struggles in public, but that was exactly what I was being directed to do.   Standing there in front of a ward full of strangers who knew me as nothing more than Liz’s husband who left his wife and family alone for seven months immediately after moving in, I was called on to admit how I felt and what I’d been through — even if in an abbreviated form.

However, I was not there to complain.  The details of my struggles remain my own.  However, the part I needed to share depended on what bit of struggling I did share.  This year has taught me to be empathetic to those who decide it’s easier to believe that the answer to the question “why” is that there is no God, and that it is all just random chance.  It would seem be easier to give up everything rather than believe in a God who could inflict such pain on one who he nominally loves.  Standing in front of that congregation as an emotional wreck, I testified that this view was very short sighted.  While I can understand how one could reach that conclusion, and how it could be appealing to just give up faith in exchange for not wondering why anymore, I couldn’t bring myself to take that step.  As much as it might temporarily ease some pain, I am perfectly confident that it is wrong.  While I don’t understand the purpose in pain, I do have hope that there are several, and that they are all worth it.  Even seemingly pointless suffering has a purpose, and I testified that I was certain we would see and understand that in it’s fullness in the end.  I declared that I have faith in the Lord’s timing, unbounded love, and deliberate purpose.

I didn’t know it at the time, but there were many more there beyond myself who needed to hear that.  One of my young men had been admitted to the hospital with what was reportedly a minor bug, but I found out later that the situation was very serious and the family was struggling.  Another thanked me for reminding them their fight with an aggressive cancer had a point.  The most poignant example took a week to evolve.  A friend confided in me that his wife’s health had been rough lately, and that she had been diagnosed with a heart condition just recently.  He was confident that it was treatable, but was obviously weighed down by the reality of his present.  I shared with him a little of my experience when Liz got sick, and we parted ways.

Yesterday morning Liz got a phone call telling her that our friend had died that night of her heart condition.  Her husband had been out of town.  This fantastic 31 year old wife and mother was called home to heaven and her husband now faces the full anguish that I only contemplated several years ago.  My heart aches for him and his children.  I doubt anything I said will help him.  Logic and reason cannot penetrate that kind of sorrow, but I think that above all else I needed the reminder.  Grief and pain exist in a very real way, and cannot be compared between sufferers, and much of what happens makes no sense given our mortal perspective, but I do believe there is another, more perfect, perspective where all this makes sense.

The Lord has a sick sense of humor…  I have a long established dislike of scouting (that’s probably too mild of a word, but I’m trying to be positive), and have recently been caught expressing my feeling that the only calling in the ward I would like less than being Bishop would be as the Scout Master.  About six months ago, while I was passing through Amarillo on my way back to DC after an unplanned and very short return to New Mexico, I got a call from the stake Executive Secretary asking if there was any way I could meet with the Stake President before I returned to DC.  The Bishop had been in the calling long time, and the talk was that it was time for someone new.  Seeing as how I had already left the state on my way to DC and wouldn’t be back for six months, the appointment never happened.  About four months later, they called a new Bishop…  Bishop Johnson.  I joked that it must have been that other brother Johnson they were looking for.

When I got home, everybody teased that I had dodged a bullet.  My response was generally along the lines of… “Yeah, so long as they don’t call me to be the scoutmaster instead.”   Fast forward a month or so, and lo and behold, exactly that happened.  I actually contemplated going inactive for a few years rather than accept the calling…  As a more positive alternative, I opted to accept the calling, and am still working on getting my mind wrapped around the fact that I have to have anything at all to do with the BSA.  I have been firmly in the camp that believes the church should cut ties with that organization, and have been disappointed every time the decision has been made to stick with them.   When I accepted the call to work with the young men, the Bishopric agreed that there was no need for me to dress up in a stupid uniform, and that I could make the program what I wanted it to be.  So… we’ll have a bunch of young men’s activities, and help the boys that are interested to earn rank/badges/whatever on the side.   That aside, I am now decidedly affiliated with scouting.

The first activity we’ve done (aside from one weeknight teaching boys to handle/throw/tie ropes) was a camp-out and rock-climbing.   Of the more attractive aspects of this almost God-forsaken city is that it’s a relatively short drive from here to some of the most beautiful ponderosa forests and  high-deserts you’ll find. As a consequence, there are a wide variety of people who rock-climb, hunt, mountain-bike, hike, show-shoe, and almost any other outdoor activity you can find.  With several avid climbers in the ward, the scouts have done an annual climbing trip every year for the last four years.  All I had to do was show up with a truck to haul all the boys gear and participate in the fun.

Weather here has been gorgeous lately, with temperatures near eighty, and overnight lows only dropping into the fifties.  Nobody thought too hard about the fact that the place we would be climbing would be several thousand feet higher elevation, so everyone was shocked when it had dropped down near 20 by morning.  I think I was probably one of the only ones who was comfortable (I never rely on scouts to plan and pack for me…  I keep what I need to be comfortable in my truck toolbox pretty much all the time).   It was a chore to peel the boys away from the fire to get camp broken down, but we succeeded and were packed up and headed to the rock-face by seven thirty.

Of the boys and leaders, everyone but one of the young men went up the rock face at least twenty feet.  A few of the boys made it to the top of the most difficult route (I only made it 1/3 of the way up that particular one before realizing pulling my 200 lbs another 40 feet up that route wasn’t something I was going to be able to finish).  I was proud of all of them.  Of the croud, I managed the worst injuries with just some skinned knuckles and a little road-rash on an elbow (on that last and most difficult climb), so the trip met my criteria for success — nobody in the E.R. and everyone tired and happy on the ride home.  Pictures below:

About 12 years ago, Kara (one of our friends) had just had a second child and was struggling with the adjustments required to bring a new kid into their home.  Their oldest son was a handful to say the least.  He was more than normally bright, and exceptionally energetic… a combination that often leads to trouble, and this kid was trouble in so many ways.  Kara had been having a hard enough time dealing with this fireball of destructive curiosity and energy, and adding another baby with the additional burdens of postpartum depression and general life difficulties only complicated matters.

In a moment of frustration Kara vented some of her self doubt to her doctor, wondering what she had done wrong with her oldest to make him so difficult to manage and how she was going to cope with another of the same breed.  The doctor, who had apparently been in practice some time, responded simply that she just needed to have another kid.  Kara was horrified.  However, the doctor continued his prescription by saying something along the lines of “By the time you have three kids, you realize none of it is your fault, they are all different, and came hard-wired like that in spite of anything you do to try to change it.”   In Kara’s case, her second son turned out to be a sensitive, quiet, and easy-going baby.  Her two boys definitely came from God distinctly pre-configured with personalities and characteristics of their own.   Yesterday, I got another piece of evidence to add to my collection in support of this theory.

I have satisfied the doctor’s prescription, and have three highly unique and wonderful children.  True to the doctor’s predictions, they came hard-wired to be very different from each other.  The most recent example revolves around learning to ride a bike.  I had spent some time this week getting Isaac’s bike fixed up for a mountain-biking trip with Scouts, and consequently had bikes on the brain when I found myself with a few unaccounted for minutes.  Looking around the garage, I saw Isaac’s old bike and realized I was overdue teaching Michael how to ride.  I aired up the tires, lubricated the chain and wheels, grabbed Michael’s helmet, and called him out to the front yard to start the potentially long and painful process of teaching him to ride.

When Sydney was learning to ride, she was overly cautious, afraid of everything, and would take a long time to get over a crash and be ready to go again.   It took months of refusing to give in to her pleas to re-install the training wheels to get her stable and pedaling on her own.  Even after she’d learned to ride, she would often crash in anticipation of a crash or freeze up and crash when something different happened anywhere near her.  Teaching her to ride was a slow and painful process.  To this day, I have difficulty getting her on a bike.

Isaac, on the other hand, was utterly fearless.  When we bought his first bike, he informed me he wanted me to take off the training wheels and that he could do it without me.  He was simply going to climb on the bike, start pedaling, and be an expert immediately (incidentally his approach to almost any physical activity).  I didn’t comply with that request right away, but it wasn’t long before he had his way.  He was overconfident.  Because of his over-confidence, his crashes were often somewhat catastrophic both physically and emotionally, requiring some time for him to recover his willingness to move on.  However, he universally recovered and it didn’t take long before he was tearing around the neighborhood at full speed every opportunity he had.

Given the wide differences between these two experiences, I was interested to find out how Michael would do.  Personality-wise, he falls somewhere between Sydney and Isaac.  He is fairly tender, crafty, and cuddly.  However, with a big brother like Isaac, he is also fairly hardy…  He learned early to recover from being knocked over (by Isaac, the dog, the goats, or just tripping on something out in the barn), and for the last six months of city life has been learning all kinds of physical skills at the “Ninja Park” gym where the workouts consist of things like climbing or jumping over and off of walls, walking on balance beams, and stuff like that.

When I told Michael he was going to learn to ride a bike, he was a little nervous at first, but excited at the same time.  Unlike Isaac, he asked for training wheels… I said no and he mostly accepted my answer in spite of being nervous.  He asked me to hold on tight as he straddled the bike, and I got him rolling with my hand on his back to steady him.  Almost immediately he was stable, and I lifted my hand off his back and he rode for about 20-30 feet on his own.  Balance wasn’t going to be a problem for this kid.

As promising a start as this was, we still had a ways to go.  Because Michael had essentially grown up on a farm where there were almost no paved surfaces, he had never had much experience pedaling tricycles, and the concept of pedaling forward didn’t resonate immediately.  He’d get going, get relatively stable, and push down on a pedal before it was over the top of the turn.  On my bike, that’s not a particular problem because the crank will just cycle backwards.  However, on Michael’s bike, that motion activates the breaks, and every few seconds he would come to an unexpected and screeching halt, followed by a crash.  I didn’t think I’d ever run into a scenario where balance and steering weren’t the problem, but pedaling forward was.  To Michael’s credit, though, every time he crashed he would dust himself off, grunt or growl like his dad often does when something frustrating like that happens, and get back on the bike.  Within about 15 minutes, we had made it to the park nearby and he was riding laps around the playground without my direct intervention.

This proved to be something of a challenge for me though… I was supposed to jog along beside him to keep him from any serious danger, but I had started the day with a 2.5 mile trail run with Liz, followed it with a 2 1/2 hour hike up the mountain with the boys, and now running for another 30 minutes along side of Michael was taking it’s toll — especially since I’m still not acclimated to the altitude here after spending months at sea-level.  I needed to quit, but Michael was having none of it.  I used the convenient excuse that we needed to show Mom the amazing progress he had made to convince him to head home.  It didn’t stick though… no sooner had he shown Mom his progress than he was adamant he needed more practice.  This time I figured he was doing well enough that I could get away with trailing him on my bike, and this adjustment made it possible for him to spend another hour riding around the park.  Before long he felt comfortable enough to ride the circuit while I sat on a park bench and enjoyed the beautiful spring afternoon.

Eventually Liz reminded me I needed to come home and clean up so I could take her out to see a live performance of “South Pacific” and take her to dinner.  Michael would have stayed longer, but you can’t argue with Mom when she’s planning on going out on a hot date.  All told, Michael spent less than two hours start-to-finish learning to ride a bike.   He never had training wheels, had little experience with pedal-driven equipment, and yet was by far the fastest learner of the three.  Three kids… three rounds teaching them to ride a bike… three totally different experiences driven by the highly distinct nature of the kid being taught.  I’m no expert in the broader world of kids, but I can say from many different experiences that my kids, at least, came hard-wired with certain traits and tendencies.