Beyond Walking

Pockets Full of Secret Treasures

Anyone who has ever raved about the baby gear storage capacity beneath any given stroller is lying. Or maybe their child isn’t yet old enough to hop in and out of the stroller on the ride, repeatedly tossing found items into that storage space. Or maybe they’re simply taking walks in barren parking lots.

Either way, in my experience, that space is mainly good for one thing: leaves, feathers, sticks, and rocks — and don’t think about stuffing even a jacket in on top of those goodies, lest it accidentally damage a leaf. This isn’t limited to strollers, of course. Essentially any outdoor kids’ ride-on item is likely to be filled with the loot of the day’s walk (and maybe of the day’s before that, and the day’s before that. Oops.)

*Leaves from this year? Last year? Who knows!*

Making walks fun for stubborn little kids

Why little? Because I have no experience incentivizing walks for big kids. I’ll revisit that in a few years.

In the meantime, I find myself trying to come up with creative ways to convince our five-year-old that yes, it is a good idea to go for a walk. It’s not that she has any problem with the outdoors, or dislikes walks as a rule. But when she only wants to swing, or draw with chalk, or doesn’t want to go out in the cold, or just needs a little boost to get going, sometimes I’ve got to think outside the box. (And yes, of course we let her swing and draw with chalk and all those other things. But walks are good for grown-ups, too!)

Difficulties with (my) little kids tend to occur very early in the walk (okay, basically just getting out the door) and sometime later during the last third or so. When the two-year-old was in a backpack carrier, the negotiations were limited to only one child, which helped. But now both kids are a bit big for that. So, here are some of the tricks that I have had success with.

Reading for When the World Is on Fire

*Smoke-filled skies around Twisp, WA, in late July 2015, as part of what would become the Chelan Complex fire.*

These are not easy days to read the news, or listen to it, or think about it. As I heard one radio reporter say yesterday, “It seems the whole world is on fire right now.” Indeed.

In the past week, three articles have stayed with me as I’ve gone about my days. Here’s why.

I have watched with some interest over the past four years or so, but particularly the past one or two, the manner and degree to which climate change appears on the front page. Plenty of others have been watching the same thing, some of them analyzing references to keywords like oil, or fossil fuels, or human involvement (and far too often the lack of those references). I watch and I wonder when hope gives up the ghost. When the last line of “But there is still time” turns into something else. And I feel that to some small extent, we’ve reached that point. Perhaps not that doom is written in stone, but that something is, or at least that there is widespread acknowledgment that the consequences of climate change aren’t waiting in some far-off future but are here, now.

Five for Friday: January Fires and More

One of the reasons I enjoy the Capital Weather Gang (CWG) is that in addition to solid regional weather coverage, they provide insight into national and worldwide weather events and climate. This story, about current California wildfires, showed up on my Twitter feed this week. Given the blur that was the second half of last year, it would have been easy to think, “Gee, well, it’s September, and there are fires. Next.” But, no, time has in fact passed, and it’s January… and there are fires. Not just in California, either.

Resource-short and World Weary: Combatting Climate Change Is Hard

Over the past several years, I have tried–and I continue to try–a variety of ways to reduce household waste, to shop, cook, and live in a simpler manner. In so many ways, I fail again and again. Some days, even trying seems useless, especially if I’ve spent any time at all reading climate-related news. Most days, I just keep trying, taking steps that seem miniscule and feel futile. But ultimately, I know I owe it to myself, to my children, to keep trying.

I am often irritated by climate change writing that suggests there is a path forward without detailing what that path might actually look like in daily life. There is also a contingency of writers who will offer ideas on how to make changes in one’s home, for example, and spin it so it seems like those individual actions will save the world.

Obviously it’s good that anyone discusses this at all, but my take is that as we discuss vague and sweeping notions of long-term change and then stoke our own egos when we do even the smallest good thing, we aren’t starting enough conversations with the people we know, and certainly we aren’t being honest and realistic enough about how damn hard this all is.