It’s Saturday, and this morning, Steve and I were able to lie in bed talking for a while.  Margaret was reading.  Caroline was sorting her “treasures” into like-kind piles on the table in the office. (She and Cormac have begun collecting and comparing found objects from cracks in the city’s cobblestone streets.)

“Let’s bike out to that breakfast place near Bunnik,” Steve suggested.

“I had the same idea,” I said, “Do you think it will be too crowded?”

“No one is up and biking by 9 a.m. here,” he replied.

It was still 8:30, and while we showered, Caroline and Margaret came in.

“Do you want to bike out to a pancake place?” I asked them.

“Be careful,” Steve warned, “That’s not quite right.  You might make someone sad when she realizes that she won’t be biking but will be riding in the bakfiets,” [i.e. in the box in front of the cargo-bike].   True to his prediction, Caroline was instantly sad about not being allowed to ride her bike to breakfast.

“It’s not f-a-i-r,” she whined, while collapsing to the ground in protest.

“Can you think of a reason why you can’t bike out to Bunnik?” Steve asked.

“‘Cause I’m just learning to ride my bike and I’m not good enough yet,” Caroline dramatically replied, picking herself up just enough to flop on our bed.

“That’s right,” Steve said.  “It might not seem fair, but is there any way that we can speed you up and make you 8 years old instead of 4?”

“No,” she admitted.

We all rallied, got dressed to shoes and brushed hair and teeth.  Steve and Caroline kept talking, and by the time I went outside with Margaret to unlock our bikes, Caroline informed us that she was going to bike for a while before locking up her bike and riding the rest of the way in the bakfiets.

“That’s ok by me,” I replied.

“But that’s not f-a-i-r,” Margaret began.  “I don’t want to have to keep stopping all of the time.  I want a nice long bike ride with no interruptions.”

“You’ll get it, but you have to be patient,” I said.  “Maybe in 30 minutes you will have a faster bike ride.  It’s an opportunity for delayed gratification.” (Ever since Steve told Margaret about the marshmallow test given to kids and its correlation to adult happiness, she’s had a competitive drive to eat her vegetables first and otherwise build her self-discipline.)

Still not converted to joy, Margaret moped around our lane, complaining for a while, while Steve studied the map and memorized the green bike route all of the way to the Bunnik tea house.  He took the lead on the bakfiets [box-bike], which is built to carry four toddlers or two hundred pounds of potatoes, not for speed.  Margaret followed, and my job was to ride just to the rear-left of Caroline while she hugged the right curb of the designated lanes.

It was a lovely bike ride, which crossed only three intersections the whole way.   After each slow start across one street and at the two traffic signals, Caroline biked smoothly, like she’d been born in the Netherlands.

Here is her report:

“But it turned out that I didn’t even ride in the bakfiets.  And the pancakes were great. There were goats and they licked us, and we fed them leaves ’cause when we first feeded them leaves, they fighted over it, butting each other against the barn. So it turned out that when Mom and Dad were ordering, the goats were fighting over the leaves that we were feeding them, so we kept feeding them leaves.  And then, on the way back from breakfast, we runned over the railroad track, but we had to wait for some bikers and cars to pass us.”

(Me)  “Was it difficult to ride all eight miles to Bunnik and back?”

(Caroline)  “No.  I was just a little bit tired from steering, and my hands were sweaty from holding the handlebars of my bike.  But when we got home, I tied our new jump rope that we got from the festival yesterday [aka last Saturday] by the Domkerk, and I tied it to the swing and it was really fun, but first, before I did that, I swung on our swing lots of different ways, and after that, I did all of this beautiful writing.”

After reading aloud what we have written, she wants to add more:

“One day, when me and Mom and Margaret were staying home, Dad went and climbed the Domkerk, and we were very, very surprised when he told us that he climbed the Domkerk.  So we gave him a big hug and we said, ‘I wish that we could climb the Domkerk some day.’  And I think that my Mom and Dad will let me climb the Domkerk with them someday, and I’m still thinking what day.  And I really think that I miss you Grandma and Grandpa, Love Caroline and Mom.”

While we are here writing in our journal, Steve and Margaret are still out there biking home via a longer route.  And if anyone is wondering, both girls did wear helmets this morning.  Margaret, however, wants you to know that she didn’t want to because “normal Dutch people do not wear helmets.”