The Highs and Lows of Bakfietsy Rose

Since we moved to our new house and town in August, I haven't written much about the bakfiets. This is largely due to the fact that I've been spending so much of the day riding it, I haven't had as much time for blogging and other things. Biking the kids to school now takes about 30 minutes each way, which, if I bike exclusively all day, can multiply itself to 3 hours spent commuting by bike (because Zeb gets done with nursery school in at 12:30, and the big kids don't get done until 2:45). When we lived in town, biking was at least as fast as driving, so the timing of things was never really a factor when making the choice between taking the car or taking the bakfiets. But now it's a huge factor. We need to leave the house by 8:00 a.m. to ensure we have enough time to bike to school, and in order to do that, I really need to have made the lunches the night before. Biking can no longer be a spontaneous decision. So, the downside to all of this is that I have been driving way more than I'd like to be, even though actual mileage by bike has drastically increased since the move. The upside is that our longer commute is beautiful--often breathtaking--and 90% of the ride is on the bike path, which feels very safe and lovely. The longer stretches of time with the kids in the box has allowed us the opportunity to really enjoy all of the benefits of bakfietsing.

When we drive places, Luke and Jaz are way back in the third row of the minivan. Having a conversation is difficult at best, though it's often a non-issue since we're usually listening to something anyway (a kids' music cd or NPR). In the bakfiets, there's nothing to do BUT talk. And that's when I get to hear all about school, what the kids are learning (this week it's the life cycle of the pumpkin), what's going on socially (Jaz has plans to marry his friend Melle), and what happened in gym today (playing with scooters!). These are conversations that kids don't usually have with their parents (at least not without a lot of prying), but the lack of distraction in the bakfiets kind of forces it out of them. So our hour in the bike, on days we ride, is absolutely one of the highlights of my day. I love that we're all squished together, these days the kids bundled under fleece, barreling our way through the leafy, autumn world.

Some pictures from our 3-mile bike commute, through farmland and across the Connecticut river (these are a couple months old, so unfortunately lacking in fall foliage shots):


After I've dropped the kids off at school, the ride home is a bit lonelier. A passerby stopped me one day and asked, "don't you feel silly riding that thing around without any babies on board?" Maybe, a little. But the truth is that I feel a whole lot more silly driving the empty minivan around. The nice thing about bakfietsing with an empty box is that I can go so fast it almost feels like flying. Lately, I've taken to bringing my ipod along for those stretches of alone time in the bike. I catch up on my podcasts, and it feels like such a luxury.

In the past couple weeks, the biggest obstacle to biking has been the weather. I had imagined that we'd be able to continue biking until there was snow on the ground (and the only reason I thought we'd have to stop then is because they don't plow the bike path, which is the only safe way for us to get anywhere from our new house). But already the cold morning air has been causing some biking resistance on behalf of my passengers. It's been about 40° most mornings, and the wind once we start going is a bit chilly. We bundle the kids up really well, but their faces still get cold. And the ride becomes less of a "oh what a beautiful mor-ning!" experience, and more of a "Are we there yet? I'm freezing!" nightmare. Partially it's just that the novelty of zooming around in the box has worn off, but the kids are still pretty happy (or at least willing) to ride in the afternoons when it's warmer out. So we've mostly not been riding in the mornings. Which is both sad (because I love riding in the mornings, it reminds me of crew practice my first semester in college, with the mist rising off the river, and feeling like such a strange mixture of freezing and sweaty. I can hear the voice of my coach in my head, saying, "your body can do this. Your mind is the first to give up, but your body won't quit on its own"), and a bit of a relief (because we no longer have to rush, rush, rush to get out the door on time). We do have the rain/cold weather cover for the bakfiets, but unfortunately the kids don't fit under it with their helmets on (Zeb fits, but not the big kids). I'd be fine with them going without helmets since we're mostly riding on the bike path, but in MA, kids under 12 have to wear helmets, and I get enough attention with the bakfiets that I don't feel comfortable breaking the law with it just yet (not to mention the difficulty of convincing the kids--especially Lukas, the hall monitor--to break the law too).

Here's a short video Lena made of us leaving for school one morning a few weeks ago:



And then, 15 minutes later, after we'd stopped to rebundle due to excessive complaints:



So, in short, I love the bike more than ever and am in better physical shape than I've been in since college. The kids love the bike somewhat less than before, though they're also starting to understand and appreciate why we choose to bike when we can. We're riding further distances, but driving more too, and the cold weather definitely puts a damper on things. If anyone has any suggestions for how to keep kids warm in the box, minus the rain cover, they'd be much appreciated!

Where We've Been

I've been somewhat absent from this blog lately, and I'm not entirely sure why. I have so many posts written out in my head, and the only reason I can think of for why they're not making it into the computer is because we've been spending so much time outside in this most gorgeous autumnal world. Hopefully it will rain one of these days, and I'll get a chance to catch up. Until then, here's a taste of what we've been doing:

Zeben, the Big Kid

Lena and I have been debating for months about when to cut Zeben's hair. The idea that we should cut it has been suggested several times (mainly by both of his grandmothers) ever since Zeb turned one (so almost a year ago), and until recently we felt pretty strongly about leaving it as it was. In the past couple months, I've been wavering a bit as his hair has grown scragglier and gotten long enough to get stuck in his boogers. Lena was feeling less inclined to cut, depsite the bird's nest and boogers, especially during the humid days when his hair would curl slightly around his ears and at the base of his neck (Luke and Jaz both have bone straight hair, so any hint of a curl on Zeben's head has been enough to make us squeal with glee). How could we cut off his curls? So we resolved to wait until his second birthday, when the humidity (and "curls") would be gone, and when he'd really be a toddler.

But then, this morning, after freeing his hair from his clogged up nose for the upteenth time, I said, "maybe we should cut it right now." And Lena said, "really?" And Zeben said, "Yeah! Haircut now!" We're a month and two days shy of our planned haircut date, but we decided to listen to the baby anyway. We brought Zeb outside with the haircut stool and I snipped away for all of 4 minutes. We saved some of the snippings in an envelope so that we can peek in at them later, and cry, and wish we'd let his hair grow forever.

Zeben is thrilled with his new look. Lena and I feel relatively pleased, with a little bit of sadness mixed in. It really seemed like I was cutting away the last of his babyhood. I can't believe how much older he looks with just a little less hair. And the really shocking part is how much he looks like his big brothers (especially how much he looks like the toddler versions of them (they, of course, had the same haircut, since it's the only haircut I know how to do)). When Jaz saw him, he said, "he looks like Lukas! And a little bit like ME!" And it's rather odd how much he does.

Our good camera is out of batteries (and the charger was temporarily misplaced), so I took these photos with our old regular digital camera. I can't believe how much worse the quality is (and it was so annoying to have to deal with the digital delay!). If anyone out there in the blogosphere hasn't yet made the switch to an SLR camera--do it! The difference is amazing.

What a big, big kid.

To Find A Wife

In the fall of 1998, I went to Smith College to find a wife. Four years of high-pressure "prep" school had left me feeling academically drained and uninspired, and 95% of the reason why I decided to go to college at all was to meet my mate (the other 5% was to please my family). I chose Smith because it had a reputation of being a "lesbian camp" (this, according to one of my grandfather's friends, who was appalled to hear that that's where I was going to school. My grandfather replied, "well, my granddaughter's a lesbian!"), so logically it seemed like the place to go. And once I got there, I was not disappointed. There were lesbians everywhere! It seemed that nearly everyone was at least open to the idea of dating women, and within a week even my previously "100% heterosexual" roommate had a girl in her bed. I was not quite so lucky. Despite the fact that I made it clear to practically everyone I met that I was looking to meet my wife, get married and have babies, pronto, I remained painfully single for the first couple months of the fall semester (writing that out, I have to wonder if maybe my upfront disclosure was actually the reason why I remained painfully single for my first months at Smith).

I met Lena for the first time at the infamous "immorality" party on the Saturday before Halloween. The party was held in one of the Smith houses (aka dorms), and everyone was encouraged to wear as little clothing as possible. Some people wore lingerie. Some wrapped themselves minimally with saran wrap. I wore a pair of carhartt overalls with nothing at all underneath them, and I nearly froze my nipples off, waiting for 30 minutes outside in the line to get in (I still wonder if maybe that's why nursing was so painful for the first several months . . . ). Once inside, I eventually made my way to my friends' room and that's where I saw Lena for the first time. I have a vague memory of what she was wearing (or not wearing), but remember mostly that she was introduced to me as a "senior, b-doc rugger." Translation: she was in her final year at Smith, a "Big Dyke On Campus," (a title which she would later deny), and she played rugby. She remembers me as "that crazy first year who was looking for a wife." That night I began casually dating someone else who I met at the party and finally felt like I'd found what I was looking for.

While my first romance at Smith didn't last more than a couple of weeks, it was my key into the social scene of my dreams. I was meeting all sorts of fun and crazy people at nightly parties, many of which took place in Lena's on-campus apartment. It wasn't until one night at the end of January that Lena and I even considered the possibility of being more than friends. It just sort of happened, out of the blue and unexpected, and we somewhat reluctantly became a couple . . . it wasn't that we weren't truly enjoying each other, but I didn't, at first, think she was my wife, and she didn't have any interest in being anyone's wife at that point in time (she was actually unsure she even wanted to be anyone's girlfriend). I still had three years of college ahead of me, and she was nearly done. I'd be stuck in the same place for the foreseeable future, and she was ready to get out of town. We were opposites in so many ways, but we were falling in love regardless.

one of the first photos of us, summer 1999

By the end of our first summer together (8 months after we'd started "dating"), we were engaged. Lena made me a ring out of hemp, though there was no official proposal. Or rather, there were several different proposals and we both took turns asking for each other's hand in marriage. Since gay marriage wasn't actually legal at that time, we didn't plan for a wedding. But we did get a joint checking account so that I could move off-campus (most Smith students are required to live on campus, but exceptions are made for married students, or in our case, students with joint checking accounts). Lena decided to stick around the valley and wait for me to graduate. We lived in several different places and acquired a lot of pets (4 apartments, 3 puppies and 19 kittens in 2 years).

When it came time for me to declare my major (towards the end of my sophomore year), I seriously considered dropping out of school. After all, I'd already found my wife. And I just couldn't think of anything that I wanted to study. I flipped through the course catalog over and over again, reading what each department had to offer. I wanted to be a midwife, and it didn't seem like any of the classes at Smith were really applicable to midwifery (though in retrospect I'm sure that some of the bio classes would have been helpful). In the end, I decided to stay and get my BA, majoring in Education and Child Study. I would be a teacher. I'd get hands-on experience and learn by doing. And the carrot dangling at the end of college was that when I made it through, we'd get married. And have a baby.

Lena and I originally had lots of ideas about what kind of a wedding we wanted and where we wanted to have it. But with no money to pay for a wedding, and no particularly willing-to-pay family members, we eventually decided that getting married wasn't that important to us after all. I honestly had never really fantasized about the wedding part of having a wife; as a kid I remember thinking that weddings seemed awfully wasteful. And Lena felt equally ambivalent. We were committed to each other. And that was all that mattered. Until I got pregnant.

I got pregnant a couple weeks after graduating from Smith, and was about 3 months along when it suddenly dawned on me that I wanted to get married before the babies were born. I was worried that people wouldn't know that the babies were Lena's babies too, that the babies would be "illegitimate" (not literally, of course. Coincidentally, my mother and father were married by a justice of the peace when my mother was 7 months pregnant with me, for the same illogical reason). With only a few weeks notice, we managed to gather most of our immediate family members and two close friends to help us celebrate our civil union in Vermont (my parents had a small house in Vermont at the time). On October 5th, 2002, we were legally unionized. It was a beautiful ceremony.


An excerpt from the speach we prepared for the Justice of the Peace:

May these two women continue to keep this promise that they have made. May they succeed in their shared dream of achieving their personal goals while honoring the love--and family--that they share. May they continue to work hard to avoid unjust expectations of each other. May they continue to support the desire of one or the other to move away or stay in one place, go to school, have babies, start a business, paint the house orange, learn to sing, climb a mountain, or go roller-blading. May their decision to create a shared life not limit them, but rather give them the stability, love, and support necessary to find freedom. May they continue to love each other forever.

The cake was really good.

Eight months after our civil union, my grandparents had a big wedding reception party for us at their house in western MA. Everyone got to meet Lukas and Jasper, who were 5 months old at the time, and we did the whole fancy food, flowers and tent thing. It felt amazing to have so many of our loved ones gather to celebrate us and our love.

Photo booth photo from
just before the big party

The following spring, on May 17th, 2004, gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. We stood in line with dozens of other local gay couples and got our marriage license. We were legally married later that summer, without ceremony.

Luke and Jaz on the day Gay Marriage became legal

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of our Civil Union, which is the day we recognize as our wedding anniversary. I can't believe how much has happened in the past 6 years. We've become mamas to 3 sons. We've moved four times. We've switched careers, discovered new passions, and forgotten about things that were once important. We've felt free. May we always be so lucky. May we always have this love.

us, just the other day