Scoot!

Last year, when she turned two, we got Clio a scooter for her birthday. She took on step onto it, promptly fell off and cried and insisted it go back.

This year, we tried again. When I took Clio to Little Things, a toy store in Park Slope, to make a birthday list, she rode the display scooter around the store the whole time, gleefully sailing from the dolls to the arts and crafts and back again. Upon hearing this, Nonny and Papa offered to get her the scooter for this birthday, so I went back and bought it in orange. Clio loved it upon opening and then refused to ride it. Wouldn't even set a foot on the thing.

My first mistake? Orange. Turns out, Clio wanted a pink scooter. Not knowing this was truly foolish of me- everything these days comes down to pink or red. So much so that I had to take all the pink toys away from Clio and Elsie the other day unless there were two identical things so they could each have one. When I realized that I only had two clean kid cups left at lunchtime, and that one of them was pink (but the other one was not), I had to do some quick thinking to avoid a disaster, and gave one girl a pink cup with a green straw, one a green cup with a pink straw. In a world where everything must match and pink rules, this was, apparently, just enough. I also need to realize that pink may not be just the age, and that it's time to stop forcing my preferences on my daughter as if I know better: when I was about her age and my parents re-painted by bedroom, I chose orange. Guess what color my bedroom is now? Not pink.


My second mistake? None of Clio's friends have scooters, and right now she has little interest in doing anything that someone else isn't already doing. I suppose peer pressure can be a useful thing: to get Clio riding, we simply brought her scooter to Lydia's block party and suggested Lydia take it for a spin.


Tricky. Maybe even devious. But effective: Eventually, Clio decided she wanted to have a turn, too.
I think it's also helpful to have a destination, and the conga band was a pretty intruiging one at the party.


Let's hope there are regular bands of scooter-riders in our neighborhood in Boulder- I think Clio shows real potential; she just needs "encouragement" of the non-parental variety.

And yes, she has a helmet; but that has been a complete deal breaker, so while she's in the barely-standing-and-barely-moving-while-being-supervised-phase, I think we'll let it go.