Seat

Just over a year ago, when Cam arrived into our lives, we accepted that Things Would Change.

Once there is a tiny additional human occupying your spare room, opportunities to do the things which used to be the things that you did to relax and enjoy yourself become a bit thinner on the ground.

I have been tremendously lucky; Mrs L has been extremely accommodating of my need to go out and play a stupid game where ten grown adults throw a ball through a hoop for forty minutes. Basketball generally takes place during times when Cam would (and, thankfully, is) usually sleep, so I've never felt like I'm leaving Mrs L to deal with the baby while I go out and enjoy myself.

The same can not be said for my other pre-baby hobby: cycling. 

It is fair to say that I have missed cycling. Time spent on two wheels since Cam arrived has been minimal. Which is fine, obviously. I love the time I spend with Cam and I wouldn't change it for anything. 

Unless I could combine cycling and Cam. I don't mean I want to create a cyborg bicycle child. I just want a way to get out on the bike without having to leave the family behind when I do.

Which is why, pretty much as soon as he was able to hold his head up, I started thinking about bike seats for Cam. There's not an enormous amount of information out there about cycling with a baby, but there is some. I looked at www.cyclesprog.co.uk and www.sustrans.org.uk. Most importantly, I got some first hand information and recommendations from Cathy Bussey's blog. All of which led me to thinking that Cam's first birthday would be a good time to start seriously considering cycling with him.

Cathy had some good things to say about a Dutch baby seat called the Yepp Mini. So, I bought one. Here it is mounted on my 1994 Kona Kilauea:

Fitting it was very simple, a five minute job which required only a couple of allen keys (Yepp even include one in the box, although it is made of metal which is about as durable as a mild cheddar). The mount goes between the stem and the headset if you have a "traditional" threaded headset.

If you have a threadless headset, you'll be needing an additional adaptor before you can fit the seat. This, to me, seems a bit backwards. Most bikes now come with a threadless headset, it would probably be more sensible to include the adaptor as standard. I'm not complaining though, since my ancient Kona has the old style headset.

Once it was fitted, I looked at the bike and thought "there's no room left for me". Luckily, this is a bit of an optical illusion (apparently I don't occupy as much space as I thought). Once on the bike I was close enough to Cam to feel like I was giving him a cuddle, without him being in my way, or me being in his. My knees do brush the back of the seat a bit, but a bit of saddle adjustment will hopefully sort that out. 

The first few moments of riding feel a bit weird; all of your baby's weight, plus that of the seat, is on the bit of the bike you use to steer. You know how it feels if you put a carrier bag with some heavy shopping in on the end of your handlebars? It's a lesser version of that. Once I'd been riding for five minutes I didn't even notice it.

You do lose some steering lock, and I'll probably add some padding to either my bike's frame or the metal bars on the seat, to stop any risk of dents in the top tube. It's not a big issue though, and you're probably not mounting a child's seat with a view to riding extreme terrain. My mother in law has told me in no uncertain terms that I'm not to do any stunts with Cam on board. No wheelies then...

Okay, that's the factual stuff over with. I would recommend the seat. The seat is good. Moving on...

Cam seemed to enjoy his first ever bike ride, we only went for a local ride, but he got to see the world from a different point of view (it's nice and open compared to his buggy) and didn't cry or scream once.

I came back with a massive smile on my face and a feeling that we have opened a door to all sorts of potential family fun. Getting out of the house with a baby can be a bit of a chore. Everything takes AGES with a little person in tow. Buggies are very short range instruments, and starting the car to drive a mile seems incredibly wasteful to me.

A bike seat occupies a lovely middle ground, it offers much of the freedom a car does, but without the running costs. It also means I will have more chances to do a thing I enjoy, and involve my baby in it as well. 

Erm, it might read like one, but this isn't a sponsored post. I just really like cycling and I'm really glad I can now do some with Cam on board. If Yepp want to give me some free stuff, I'd gladly take it, but they haven't up until now...

Helmets

Firstly, a thank you to @SAHDandproud for blogging about this and tempting me to join in. I've wanted an excuse to post about cycling for ages, cos I loves it.

About six years ago I entered a race. It was a race down a hill on a bike. This particular hill was, at the time of the race, extremely muddy due to an overnight storm. It had lots of big, pointy rocks sticking out of the ground, it had tangled networks of slippery tree roots. It had twists and turns, jumps and drops.

My first attempt at riding down the hill wasn’t the best. I slid on a root, parted company with the bike, flew through the air and was brought to an abrupt halt when my head hit a tree. My chest, arms and legs also hit the tree. I slumped to the ground and thought “ouch”.

Because I was riding down a muddy, rocky, slippery, rooty hill I was wearing a helmet. I was also wearing knee and shin pads, elbow and forearm pads. Here’s a picture of me on that very day:



Me and my big shiny helmet (sorry)

I look a bit like a Power Ranger, no?

When I lost control of my bike that day I was extremely glad I was wearing a helmet. The rules of the race meant I had to be wearing one, but I would have been anyway. Call me crazy, but if I think there’s a chance I’ll be getting into a fight with a tree, I want to have as much protection on me as I can. Trees are hard as fuck. Headbutting them is not wise if you are a squishy-bonced human.

But here’s the thing. I don’t always wear a helmet.

When I go mountain biking (rocks, roots, trees, peril) I wear one. Always.

When I go out for a long spin on the road bike (hard tarmac, wet drain covers, high speed, lots of crazy drivers, peril) I wear one. Always.

When I hop on my silly little “going to the pub or shops” bike and make a journey of just a few minutes, on the quiet roads of the town I live in (hard tarmac, minimal speed, few drivers, somewhat less peril) I don’t always bother.

Pub bike, it's silly but I love it.

This position, I suspect, is not going to win me many friends, or glean positive comments.

I am pro-helmet wearing in most instances. I’d quite like my brain to remain inside my head, rather than leaking out through a hole. I’m quite partial to all the things which having an intact brain allows me to do. I’m just not wholly convinced that cycle helmets are necessarily all that effective in keeping it there.

Even if they are good at keeping it there, they’re not necessarily good at protecting its ability to function (which, I guess, is what most people actually care about). Brain injuries are complicated, they’re not as simple as just preserving the physical form of the organ.

You probably know this, but cycle helmets aren’t like motorbike helmets. They’re not designed to withstand the sort of forces you may encounter when hit by a car.

Nevertheless, I usually wear one.

But I don’t want it to be made compulsory.

I don’t want to have the choice taken away from me.

Maybe that seems silly to you. I dunno. Maybe it is silly. I think I’m broadly in the camp that would like to make sensible decisions based on perception of risk, rather than have a one size fits all policy.

Part of me thinks this is an indefensible position. Why wouldn’t I wear a helmet all the time? What possible reason is there? Certainly not helmet hair, I don’t have enough hair for that to be a concern. It’s not because I worry about looking cool, because I never do that (also, I quite like the look of my bike helmet, it’s certainly no worse than my hair).

Of course, like an epic hypocrite, I’ll definitely want Cam to wear a helmet. Can we make it compulsory for kids? I think I’ll always wear one once he’s old enough to notice.

So, in summary, I don’t always wear one, I don’t want someone to make it law that I have to, but I’m not really sure why. How wonderfully inconclusive.

Regardless of how I feel about bike helmets, there are other things I’d rather see happening to make cycling safer. Driver education to improve roadcraft and decision making, as well as promoting empathy with cyclists would be good. Cyclist education for all the same reasons.

Cycle safety is a far more than just convincing people to wear helmets.

What do you reckon? Am I an epic twat for not always wearing one? Do you think we should also wear helmets to cross roads?

Losing

I am rubbish at losing.

Really bad.

When I was a little boy, my parents threw a birthday party in my honour. There were games. Oh the games. You know the ones: Pass the Parcel, Sleeping Lions, Musical Chairs. That sort of thing.

Pass the Parcel at this birthday party went like this: parcel is passed, wrapping is unwrapped, the eventual prize grows tantalisingly closer with each child, the parcel goes to one of my friends, the parcel looks TOO SMALL, there are surely NO MORE LAYERS to be removed, the prize is REVEALED, is grasped in the sticky hands of my (soon to be former) friend, is NOT IN MY HANDS ON MY BIRTHDAY.

I forget what happened next. It's difficult to remember anything bar the unbridled fury of my childhood self. The misplaced feeling of entitlement that my birthday had given me. Surely it was my RIGHT to win on this day?

No doubt mortified, my mum carried me away to explain the intricacies of pass the parcel (the game's not rigged, you grumpy little git, etc...) while my friends continued with the party.

I'm better at that sort of losing now. Several years of playing for an exquisitely mediocre basketball team has given me a fantastic familiarity with losing. Also, I'm English so, in terms of sport, losing is pretty much hard wired in.

The losing I'd like to be a bit better at just now is losing weight.

Me and food have a great relationship. I love it. It loves me. We are as near to symbiotic as it's possible to be without actually relying upon one another to continue existing.

Before we had The Creature in our lives, I mitigated my food intake with enough exercise to ensure I did not pile on too many pounds. I ate what I wanted, and enjoyed it. Hours of (mediocre) basketball and plenty of cycling were the antidote to my obsession with carbohydrates.

Since The Creature, I've cycled probably ten miles in total and played just a few hours of basketball.

I've been in denial about my growing mass. But this weekend I decided to weigh myself.

Purveyors of the ugly truth

Error.

Not the scales. I didn't break them. But they did confirm I'd certainly been worshipping at the calorie altar a little too frequently in the last few months. I then added to my feelings of weight based woe by placing my details in this delightful "How much of a fat bastard are you?" calculator, courtesy of the BBC. The answer, somewhat depressingly, is that I'm a fatter bastard than 84% of the world's population.

Fuckeroo.

That's pretty grim. The bitter icing on that particular cake was the little bit of extra information: "You are most similar to an American in your age group". Oh good. In terms of BMI I'm most similar to the nation which is the poster child for gluttony.

The Enemy

As you may have seen already, I'm on holiday this week, and EVERYBODY knows there's no point trying to diet/ration myself while that's the case.

Therefore, as of next week, I'll be making some changes to the food intake and the effort output. Because, apparently, it's not just the ladies who need to shed so-called "baby weight", it's me too.

Top tips welcome, leave them in my comments box, along with any spare cake you've got lying around.

Momentum

Momentum is nice. It makes life easy. When I’m out on my bike and something happens to rob me of my momentum (like a careless driver, an inopportune badger, one of Britain’s many glorious potholes, a hill) my internal dialogue becomes a torrent of spite and vitriol.

I’m already discovering that there’s a definite benefit to momentum in parenting. It’s not proper momentum, before anyone points it out, but a feeling of it.

The mounting sense of invincibility that comes from two consecutive good nights of sleep. The palpable feeling of achievement from getting The Creature to sleep for a while so that we can do something else. Like eat. Or clean ourselves.

This weekend we had momentum. We felt like we were winning at being parents, largely characterised by not feeling like we were having to work at being parents.

We spent part of an evening in our local pub, we both had a drink. We chatted and smiled.

I went for an idyllic walk in beautiful sunshine. I wore the baby for three hours, the majority of which he was asleep and making the little snuffly noises that still make my brain go all melty round the edges when I hear them. I took these pictures to remind myself of how the world could look on a good day.

Mrs L had a much needed break from the daily demands of maternity leave. The constant attention giving and inability to get anything done aside from feeding and changing, feeding and changing.

My parents visited and we went out for a pub lunch, followed by a wander around the grounds of a local manor.

It was a good weekend, but it was never going to last.

Like a metaphorical badger, The Creature has ushered in the new week with a wave of momentum stopping behaviour. Renewed commitment to exercising his lungs. A dedicated approach to pooing and weeing only once the nappy is off him and he has a clear shot at whichever parent is changing him. Suddenly deciding that, actually, he doesn’t like sleeping in a wrap.

I’m not complaining, but for the time being we’re going uphill again. Grinding the pedals and powering through. Relying on the memories of the weekend to make it through the week. Looking forward to the next stretch of freewheeling momentum, no matter how many soiled nappies, sleepless nights and vomit soaked babygros away it may be.

So, yeah, parenting. A bit like a bike ride, but less sweaty.

I Spy... H

Every week I take part in Mum of One's game of blog-based I Spy.  It is fun, so I wholeheartedly encourage you all to do the same!

This week's letter, as decreed by JB Herself, is H. Cast your peepers below to my excellent phizzog, wherein there is something (or things) beginning with the appropriate letter.

Comments in the comments place, first to guess the correct thing will receive a prize*

What do you see? Hmm?

You can use the magic of the internerd to go over to Mum of One and see who else has joined in today. Do it, or I'll send The Creature over to cry at you for hours.

*All prizes are at best shit, at worst imaginary.