Sunday, April 22, 2012

Drive-by

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am terrified of bike-riding. In fact, I forgot how to ride a bike about three times. Yes, I know that that "can't be done." Trust me, I'm living proof. I also (and I realize I'm about to lose a lot of friends here) kind of hate a lot of bike riders. The ones that don't follow the rules of the road. The ones that yell at me for being in their way on the sidewalk. The ones who have to be so bad-ass that they get into accidents because of trying to zoom around with little consideration for others. When I'm on a biking/jogging path, I follow the rules and share the road. It frustrates me that many bikers don't.

That being said, I'd love to get a bike and learn how to ride again.

That being said, I also love this website; its creator, S, was one of the chic ladies of the late, lamented Academichic. Although I'm slightly frightened by bike culture, I read her new(er) blog religiously, as she writes frankly about more than just biking. She writes about feminism, culture, classroom stuff, academics, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. Recently, she's begun a series on multilingual parenting, as she hopes to bring up her own baby daughter bilingual. We had a series of conversations and I'm honored to be one of the interviewees on her series.

So if you're interested to know about what our plans are for Baby Boots in terms of language acquisition, or if you're curious about what languages exactly we all speak, or if you just want to know the first initial of my first name (and Baby Boots'!), take a look!

4 comments:

  1. That's pretty cool that you're teaching the baby your own languages as well as English. As someone who barely can read Spanish and definitely can't speak it, I wish I had more language in my life.

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  2. I will definitely check this out! DH recently purchased a bike for me and fixed it up--although I'm holding out for a comfortable seat. I'm fine with the old-fashioned bikes that have one gear. I don't even know how many bikes this "new" one has. We haven't taken it out for a spin just yet.

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  3. How cool is it that Baby Boots will be trilingual! I wish my fella and I were fluent enough in another language to teach it to our hypothetical future kids. I'm always envious of kids who can pick up multiple languages - once I started Spanish classes in high school, I was bummed that I didn't start learning it much, much earlier because I was too old to learn to roll my R's, so my Spanish never sounds quite right.

    And I hear you about obnoxious bikers (said as someone who does ride a bike pretty regularly)! Chicago has a law that says no bikers on the sidewalk unless they're under the age of 13, so my biggest pet peeve is adults biking on the sidewalk in the first place.

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  4. Awesome!

    Our bilingual household found that things got more complicated once E started talking, but like most parenting choices it's a work in progress!

    Regarding bikes, check this out when you have a chance: http://carfreecambridge.com/

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