Sidewalk

This isn't a recent story but I will sometimes randomly think of it and want to blog about it so that I will remember it later and today I actually thought about it at a time when I actually could blog it!

This happened probably about a month after Katya had first gotten home - sometime in August 2009. Katya loves riding her bike and at first she was actually very scarey while riding her bike. She liked to ride next to you and then swerve into you slightly thinking that it was funny. I remember one time getting so mad at her doing that to me that I made her take the bike immediately home. She didn't seem to have any concept of riding in the street or watching for cars and would ride down the middle of the street and just blindly breeze through intersections without looking! It was quite a thrill riding with her sometimes - and not always in a good way! One particular day we happened to all be out riding. Tony was hitching a ride in the baby carrier on Alex's chest and we had all been out for an hour or so "park hopping". We have so many parks in our neighborhood and they are all so close together that it is easy to just ride to one and then the next one. They all have different attractions. For example, one park has the seats you can sit in and then spin around and around really fast. I remember Kaylie throwing up after visiting that park. Another park has this tall cylindrical thing with metal bars that you can stand on and use the force of your weight to spin around. My nephew got a goose-egg on that one :) Across the street we have this skateboard type thing that you can stand on and pretend like you are skateboarding. I've seen too many young kids to count fall off of that one! Anyway, not all the parks are so dangerous and we had been to several of them and were on our way home. Alex called back to Katya, "Make sure that you are riding on the sidewalk!". A moment later I see Katya dismount her bike and starting walking with it. I couldn't figure out why she was doing that as she is normally so anxious to ride faster than anybody else. Then it dawned on me...Katya actually didn't know what a sidewalk was. She had taken the word sidewalk and interpreted it the only way that she knew - as two separate words: Side and walk. And thus she really was following Alex's instructions! She was walking on the side of her bike. This made me laugh so hard!