From the category archives:

Going and staying carfree

True Life Stories of the Carfree: Annee, Moses, and their 5 kids, near Portland, OR

by Angela 04.27.2012
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We’re thrilled to bring you another installment of our continuing series on carfree families, this time featuring a Carfree Family who recently won an Alice Award for outstanding bicycle acheivement! If your family is carfree, we all need your inspiration, so drop us a line at carfreewithkids@gmail.com. If you already dropped us a line and didn’t hear [...]

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Learning to bike as a grown-up — reader advice please

by Dorea 03.21.2012

A friend and sometimes commenter here recently sent a note asking for help and encouragement. She never learned to ride a bike as a kid and wants to learn how now, but she’s getting frustrated. I have a few thoughts, but this is outside our own experience, so I’m hoping some of our readers who [...]

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On marriage, parenting, biking and blame

by Dorea 03.11.2012
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A few weeks ago, Angela got into an accident with our brand spanking new bakfiets. She caught the front wheel in a really bad pothole turning onto a poorly maintained street/alley near H’s Hebrew school. They went over hard. There was no traffic. Everyone was fine. R was in the bike but he was fine [...]

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A warm bikey glow

by Dorea 03.03.2012
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Last weekend, a collection of cargo and family bike folks gathered at our place. Aaron Naparstek, streetsblog founder, is here in Cambridge instead of Brooklyn for the year, and he and I put together the event to contribute to the Revolutions per Minute crowdsourced documentary by Liz Canning. If you haven’t seen the trailer, check [...]

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On sometimes driving.

by Dorea 02.05.2012
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With one notable exception*, most of our living is done within a couple miles of our home. R’s daycare is about six blocks away. H’s school is about four blocks away. Groceries are about a mile away in Porter Square for the store we don’t like, or a little over two miles for the store [...]

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Unpredictable Driving

Thumbnail image for Unpredictable Driving by Dorea 01.31.2012

Angela and I are both mathematicians. Inevitably, when either of us mentions math, either that we do math, teach math, or studied math, the response we get more often than not is “Oh, I hate math.” You get used to it after a while, and we can usually find ways to move conversation back out [...]

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Kids’ walking personalities

by Dorea 01.23.2012
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Rebecca wrote a great post recently at Green Baby Guide that got me thinking about the impact of kids personalities on walking for transport with small children. Rebecca is a carfree mom with a fantastically unmotivated walker, and she bemoans the constant judgment of parents who push “big kids” in strollers even though no one really bats [...]

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What we ride

by Dorea 01.09.2012

I thought it might be useful for readers to know in more detail what bike gear we use to ride with our kids. Sure, we ride our cargo bikes, but we also ride (and have ridden) several other more standard (and more affordable) set-ups. So, here is some basic info about our current rotation. I [...]

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Car culture and kids toys

by Dorea 01.02.2012
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Like many families, we’ve just had a channukah-induced influx of toys into our house. Recent improvements in storage mean that we actually do have space for these toys, and they have been keeping our kids delightfully busy. We are also blessed with considerate grandparents who remember our space constraints, often giving our kids craft sets [...]

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Unintentional Community

by Dorea 12.13.2011

In the sort of circles we travel in, there is often talk of “intentional community” and it is always considered a good thing. Sometimes “intentional community” is discussed in the context of “co-housing,” where folks own individual homes, but pool resources for common space and intentionally share things like meals, babysitting, and activities more than in [...]

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