Try-a-Bicycle

It's funny how often I start to write about Allison Clare and the phrase "obsessed with" comes to mind--each time she discovers something new in her world, she becomes fascinated with it and mulls it over in her mind all the time, pointing it out everywhere and talking about it. Since last month, it has been bicycles. We'll be driving down the road, and she'll pipe up from the backseat with joyful surprise, "Look, Mommy, a bicycle! A bicycle!" She'll spot them being ridden by kids in the street or toted by cars on the highway, adorning package labels, hanging on racks in big-box stores. Each time, she is amazed to find that an actual bicycle is "Right there! Right there!"

One day we were in Wal-Mart, running errands and burning time while Sam and a friend painted the hallway at home. She saw the bikes for sale and wanted so badly to try one that I gave in, even though I knew she'd be heartbroken when it was time to move on. Like me, she has no sense of scale or spatial relations, so she was disappointed when I told her the mountain bikes wouldn't work for her, but I found some cute little old fashioned tricycles and put her on one.

But something was wrong. She wanted to climb off right away, and wandered around the section, muttering to herself, "A hat! A hat!" She found the helmets (which I guess she had seen all the riders wearing in her many observations) and asked me to help her get one down. It was for children at least 8 years old and huge on her, but she didn't care. She put it on and toddled back to the tricycle. She looked like a drunken mushroom.

She rode that tricycle while I pulled it around, and cried when we left, and asked about it every few seconds for the remaining hour we were in the store (argh). Sam and I went back and bought one for her a few days later. By then she had learned that it had a special name, but she is a little mixed up and calls it her "try-a-bicycle," which is kind of apt, actually. It's like how she calls her small friend Elizabeth from church "Alittlebits."