5-1: Day one

I really do enjoy riding my bike. Anyone who has known me for awhile will attest to the fact that I went a little bike crazy in college. I'm sure you'll hear some crazy story about a hat with ear flaps or an incident about hitting a pedestrian or some nonsense like that. Anyway, MSU has a pretty large "biker" population but I was probably one of the more extreme bikers. I think I love the fact that you get out of your bike what you put into it. Pedal real hard and you go real fast. Stop and take a rest if you want. Nobody will honk (usually). Although the stopping and resting isn't really my style. . . I enjoy smelling the flowers, listening to the frogs croaking, and having the chance to be a car door closer to nature. The occasional bug in the eye isn't so great, especially when my eye tears so badly I can barely see, but even so - I like to bike. One of my absolute favorite things about riding a bike is zooming down a hill at full speed after working so hard to make it to the top. Until I nearly hit a dead deer in the middle of the sidewalk. Oh, that's right. Road kill on the sidewalk. Then I really had to stop and take a rest because my daughter was so emotionally scarred by the incident she couldn't stop crying. . .and I needed to get the bug out of my eye.

So, you're wondering how I survived day one? I have to say that my husband, Corey, is a real super-great husband. On our wedding day he vowed to, "celebrate my spirit" and he's really holding up his end of the bargain! I'm not sure he had this in mind, but here we are! He had to go into work for a few hours today so the kids and I made our way to the library and to the farmer's market. The farmer's market was well worth the effort to get there and I'm really excited to make this a weekly trip. The kids are so excited to be riding the bus, picking up all of the cherry and apple blossom petals blowing all around and saving worms on the sidewalk - I'm just waiting to see how long this honeymoon will last. We returned home for naps - even my oldest fell into an exhausted sleep.

This afternoon we planned to meet one of Corey's partners at his home for dinner. Initially I considered refusing the invitation because it's day one and I thought it would be too much. But, they live very close to the bus line and Corey was all for taking the bus. So, Corey returned home, we hopped on the bikes and rode to a different bus line 3 miles away (our bus line stops service early on Saturdays). We arrived just in time to catch the bus then made a bus transfer downtown East Lansing and headed to their place. We had such a wonderful time visiting - I'm so glad we went!

As we were walking back to the bus stop, we had that awful experience of watching the bus zip past about 10 feet in front of us. Ugh! It was 40 minutes until the next bus! Little did we know that it was our lucky day - a fire engine was just returning from a call to the station just down the street. We decided to go watch it pull into the garage and the awesome firefighters invited us in, turned on the lights, let the kids "drive" the truck and gave us some stickers. It was awesome!!! Then, as the kids were sitting in the truck, they got another call so we had to scramble out of the station! We watched as they drove off with lights flashing and sirens blaring.

What a wonderful day! We've been missing out on so much excitement trapped in our car all this time! If I can get out of bed tomorrow, maybe we'll have even more adventures!