As Seen Behind the Screen

It was a stunningly beautiful day. Ok, maybe it was a little warm, but it was blazingly beautiful. There was no Delta variant, no Haiti, no Afghanistan. Just the four of us in Oak Park IL under a brilliant blue sky with a soft and gentle omnidirectional breeze. A PERFECT day for a bike ride in the country. PERFECT.

So I put the bikes up on the rack and we drove to Danada, about a half hour away. It was going to be a great day. No iPads, no phones. Just a 5 mile family bike ride out to Herrick Lake and back on crushed gravel paths with small inclines and declines along the way. We’d done it before. All of us. With no problems. None at all.

But not today.

Oh my stars, it was miserable from the get go when Kyle couldn’t find his mosquito repellent bracelet in the car.

“I don’t have it! I don’t have it!”

“You can have mine, Kyle,” said Phoebe immediately scaling up from mother to martyr.

“No, I want mine! What if a mosquito bites me?!”

“You bite him back, bud!”

“What? How?”

“No,” said Phoebe. “There are no mosquitos out today. We don’t even need these.”

(Phoebe has suffered a rash of mosquito bites recently so she grabbed the bracelets out of an abundance of caution. Knock on…