Hello, everyone! I'm in California until May 30, but MB has kindly agreed to upload some pre-prepared posts for me while I'm away. I promise I'll read any comments you leave me when I get back, so please don't be shy!

Hope you like!   xoxo ~velocibadgergirl

The Story of How My Sister Scared Me Half to Death

For the fabulous Miss M, who wanted stories of me and my sister as kids.


As a child, I was a wound-up, top-speed, Energizer Bunny of a kid. I never ever stopped moving. My sister, on the other hand, was a perpetually chilled-out, daydreamy, loose-limbed child. She was quite possibly the clumsiest kid ever born. Luckily, she must've also been equipped with Secret-Service-grade guardian angels, because as many times as she tripped over and onto and into things, ran into things, fell off of things, and just flat-out fell on her face, she was never severely injured. She's never broken a bone, and never had to get stitches. On the contrary, she always seemed to have a gift for hurting herself in really interesting ways, but in never sustaining a serious injury (thank goodness).

For instance, there was the time that she tripped over something in her bedroom and hit her mouth on the metal slat of her bedframe, knocking out not her front tooth, not her newly-grown-in eyetooth, but the next tooth over, a baby tooth which was already loose. And only that tooth. There was the time that my dad took her to a carnival and she tripped over nothing at all, landed on her face, and scraped the enamel off of her permanent front teeth. She didn't knock them out, break one, or even chip one...just scraped the top layer of enamel off on the concrete. Years later, her orthodontist was able to perform some kind of abracadabra to buff out the scratched spots, and now you can't even tell. At a picnic at our cousins' house one summer, I watched her wandering across the yard, headed straight toward a giant bush. Any other kid probably would've noticed the bush, but I could tell that she hadn't. I called after her to watch out for the bush, and as she turned to hear what I was saying, she walked right into it. Then, mellow as ever, she looked up at the bush for a few moments, then calmly walked around it and kept going. Or the time she was racing our foster sister up the porch steps, put out her hands to stop herself against the glass of the storm door, and went right through, but only ended up with a tiny cut near the side of her wrist.

Looking back, I'm sure Mom and Dad and I were always poised to run and catch her before she could fall, holding our breaths waiting for a step to go wrong and Little Sis to go down. I never knew how ingrained it was in me to expect little kids to fall down and get hurt until I was at a beach in Maine, watching a friend's two-year-old running headlong across the sand, and realized that I was literally holding my breath, cringing, waiting for the tumble that never happened, the tears that never came.

A block away from my parents' house, there's a church with a parking lot behind it, perfect for roller skating and riding bikes. Instead of blacktop, it's paved with perfectly smooth, very fine-grained concrete. As kids, we constantly took our bikes down to the church parking lot to ride around. By the time my sister was about eight or nine years old, she was finally beginning to grasp the coordination necessary to ride a two-wheeled bike. She had a regular-sized bike--my old handed-down Huffy one-speed--because she was too big for the bikes that come with training wheels attached. My mom had found a set of larger-than-normal training wheels that could be attached to the Huffy, and my sister was finally at the point where both training wheels had been raised. The idea was that she would be able to ride normally if she could get the bike balanced, but the training wheels would still be there to catch her if she started to tip over.

This worked really well, and one day, she and I were at the parking lot when she got her bike perfectly balanced for the first time. Elated, she turned around and yelled to me, "Velocibadgergirl, look! I'm doing it! I'm doing it!" She was pedaling as fast as she could, her training wheels clear of the ground...and she was heading straight for disaster. The parking lot concrete was shaped like a serving tray, with a short, barely inclined lip around the edge. At the back of the lot, there was a low grassy ditch just past the lip, with a chain link fence behind it. She was almost out of concrete. I yelled, "Look out!" but it was too late. By the time my sister turned to see where she was going, she was too close to the end of the lot to stop. She hit the lip of the concrete and ramped off of it, and she and the bike sailed up into the air, then gracefully tilted over backwards and upside down, and crashed down into the ditch, vanishing from my sight.

I panicked. I threw down my own bike and ran as hard as I've ever run down to the end of the lot, where I found my poor sister lying at the bottom of the shallow ditch, in a tangle with her bicycle, understandably upset and crying for our mother. On the way down, she'd scraped her arm from wrist to elbow along the top of the chain link fence, but instead of the horrific injury this should've caused, she just had a long scratch. Nothing was broken, so we limped home, her crying and me trying to help her hobble along and drag both of our bicycles. Always resilient, I'm sure she learned to ride her two-wheel bike before the end of that summer. Looking back, it does make a funny story, but I don't think I'll ever forget seeing her sail off into the air, or watching her disappear into that ditch with her bicycle. I wonder if it would be cruel to keep my own kids on tricycles until they're eighteen...