Today is International Walk to School Day--but not for some communities where walking and biking have been banned. Two recent news stories are discouraging on many levels, but do not represent the norm as more and more communities are, in fact, adopting alternatives to driving.

• In Saratoga Springs, NY, a woman and her 12-year old son are defying school officials who, on the day before school started, advised all parents that "walking and biking to school would not be tolerated."
• In Marblehead, MA, the town's participation in today's event was cancelled while the school works out "issues related to program administration, safety, and liability."

These stories are "easy targets," for walkability advocates and that is my first complaint. The newspaper coverage of the New York story in particular follows the pattern that has become so typical of print-based media's clumsy attempt to remain relevant in an online world. Controversy-baiting stories leave little room for reasonable discourse as dozens of intemperate commentors react to the story that has set up the town for criticism without providing adequate context to explain why presumably reasonable adults in the community made decisions and now find themselves on the online hot seat. Online media (including this post of mine, to some extent) jump on the bandwagon as the Sarasota Springs story makes it to the Huffington Post, shows up in my LinkedIn Groups, and will undoubtably be a feature item in the many Pedestrian and Bike update email newsletters to which I subscribe.

Maybe the folks in Saratoga Springs ARE idiots, but I suspect there is much more to the story...the policy has been in place since 1994. The parents and administrators are probably focused on 100 other issues and it is unfair-based on the limited information reported-to leap to conspiracy and anti-progressive theories. But it is more fun to do that and it sells papers and generates online traffic. Meanwhile, the parents and community members probably feel angry and misunderstood, but dare not venture into the online argument of anonymous people who know nothing and judge everything.

In Marblehead, the local newspaper, the Marblehead Reporter, does a better job of providing context. Parents, administrators, and school officials are not characterized as opposing walking, but it seems the promotional effort "got ahead of itself." The town had recently experienced a tragedy when a high school sophmore was hit and killed by a motorist...then, a "Wellness Committee" coincidentally launched a promotion of Walk to School Wednesdays. School Board Chairman Dick Nohelty said that the program was not passed through the proper channels before launching.

The Marblehead story is a cautionary tale for walkability advocates about the importance of inclusion and consensus. These ideas--promoting walking and bike-riding--are not self-evident truths or causes "against" anyone. In fact Marblehead, like my town of Westwood, is fully signed-up for the Safe Routes to Schools program. School Superintendent Paul Dulac noted that he'd like to see that program "more integrated" before a walking campaign takes place.

It should not be controversial to organize a walk to school or choose to ride a bike. But anything involving the safety of children is an extremely touchy issue that, when it makes people uncomfortable for whatever reason, will prompt conservative reactions. I'm learning for our own committee, it is easy to make mistakes and to not include the right person, talk to people the right way, promote an idea prematurely, etc.--but I think it can be managed by maintaining a positive attitude and accepting criticism as a learning process. We can't lose sight of our overall goals as we navigate the details.

Update: a torrential downpour here has cancelled today's walk...so perhaps next week, I'll report on how this went.

Plans change. But it can be powerful to work out a long term theme for your life as a way of grounding your current choices. Last week, I spoke with Pam Slim from Escape from Cubicle Nation about how to navigate my own situation--where my "escape" is involuntary--and came away with some great ideas.

Pam writes about the importance of creating a life plan and basing your work decisions around that instead of simply acting or reacting tactically. It is difficult, especially under the pressure of an impending layoff, to step back and consider the big "what do I want to do with my life" questions. But we don't need to go that far. It's helpful just to imagine what you want your life to be like in 3-5 years.

My wife and I sat down for this exercise--which was very difficult for us. We tend to do what we want to do and we are not big on setting specific goals and objectives. It's not that we don't think about the future, but we expect to adapt constantly and generally, we get where we want to be. But we sat down and considered the whole range of life issues, beginning with where we wanted to be living.

Home

We like where we are...but we are always reading about other places and thinking about what it might be like to live there. We like moving--not the process of packing up so much, but the excitement of a new city and having to learn everything new again. However, we took a good look around us and said, "we really are in the best place now." There are always pros and cons, but we look at our 4-year old and realize she will be starting kindergarten next year and we don't want to be moving her around. She can walk across the street to school...and she will be followed by her two younger brothers over the course of the next 3 years. So really, we need to make our stand now if we want to give that stability to our kids.

We speculate about our location in town too. The house behind us went on the market...there are other houses on quieter streets with sidewalks, etc. But again, we took a look around and realized, our house is great. It would be nice to finish the basement, but why would we want to go through the whole relocation process just to get on a side street? The kids will soon be old enough to smartly cross the street to the sidewalk.

For us, that was a major decision and it settled a number of things. I had been looking into refinancing the mortgage, but some lack of certainty about the future made me hesitate. The next day, I called the bank and, as luck would have it, rates had dropped to super-low levels and we were able to get a 30-year fixed mortgage and a line of credit at a historically low rate.

Relationships and Health

We've already changed a great deal in the past 5 years. We started cycling and running and spending more time together. We decided my wife would stay home and raise our kids and that we would find a way to make it work. We decided to join a church and make religion a part of our lives and the education of our children. And, as we described above, we decided stability for the kids was important. So in this area, we felt like we were already moving towards a goal we just had not defined.

Work
I want to work independently and with others, in an office and from home. I want to thoroughly "grounded" in a base here in my home in Westwood, but would like to travel to short events (like SXSW!) occasionally. I want a flexible schedule--not a predictable routine--because I need to fit other things into my life, not be trapped at a desk in an office in Boston. And I want variety.

Sounds pretty ideal and not like many jobs...but I think it is important to just run with the vision a bit...it's not the job I get in the next month--it is a vision of what my life would be like...what would I be doing on a daily basis.

I'd be talking about social media and citizen empowerment. I would be listening to the interesting people that cause trouble because they care passionately about things. I would be writing and synthesizing what I had learned and participating as a person of consequence in every thing I did. In my paid work, I would be a thought leader, a person people sought out for advice. I would be doing things in technology--never trusting the details to consultants but getting my hands dirty. I would be writing--on my blogs and in books that served to further publicize my message. I would be connecting people, ideas, and technology in a way that made other people feel like they had the ability to influence and direct the future of their community.

So that's more of a political platform than a job. But if I have that vision, if I really believe that is what I want my future to be like, then I can begin to make decisions about what helps get me there, what is necessary, and what I must leave behind.

An equally important part of the vision is the vision of not standing in line for food stamps, updating my blog from my iPhone, while our house is foreclosed upon. I may have the luxury of a few weeks here to introspect on this blog, but bottom line is I need to find a way to make some money fast. I also believe we have not seen the worst of this economic downturn and the time I have to land something that supports my long term goals is limited. But the vision is useful because if I can fit tactical decisions into a longer term plan, I can act with authenticity and confidence...and ultimately do what needs to get done.

I could not resist taking a photo of half my garage this weekend as I realized we are seriously into cycling and running and taking our kids along.

Our latest addition to this collection is the blue dual baby jogger in the back which allows all 5 of us to go out at the same time.

We have a set of magnetic toys my kids play with--animals with interchangeable torsos, heads, and legs. Today we could not find the legs to the giraffe. Before I could begin searching for the missing pieces, my daughter simply placed the existing pieces on the train table in the "water" area and said, "the giraffe is standing in the water."

Later, I searched all over the room for the missing pieces, only to learn from my wife that they had been missing for a year, so my search was doomed to failure from the start.

How often in our work do we fail to see the 4-year old solution? How often do we bang our heads against the wall in an effort to solve the problem as we have defined it, when perhaps, that is not the problem at all?

The problem is not about how to fix the giraffe; it is how to have fun. And if something is missing or not perfect, we can worry and fret and try to change things...or we can find a different way to have fun. Now, if I could just get her to teach that to my 2-year old.

The transplanted shrub that bloomed when Sharon was born...blooms a month late this year and with a spectacularly colorful flower:

On Friday, we're planning to load up the minivan and drive 600 miles to visit the grandparents. My Mom was going to come up to Boston in February, right after Marshall was born, but she fell and broke her hip and hasn't had a chance to meet Marshall yet.

Planning a drive from Boston to Virginia brings back fond, faded memories of 20 years ago when such a drive was done alone, all night, with a pack of Lucky Strikes and cooler full of Coca-Cola...back when gas was perhaps $1/gallon. Lots of things have changed since then.

Back then, it was an adventure; I had flown to Boston after high school to attend MIT and generally flown cheap flights back and forth until one summer when I had a car. My high school friend and I drove up from VA, and I drove back and forth a few times marking the landmarks and getting a feel for the size of the East Coast. Later, my wife and I would drive across country, back and forth at least half a dozen times, and I always felt the drive helped me really get a feel for the size of our country and a sense of what lies between.

But this time, it's a different type of adventure. It will be a two-day trip; we leave Friday evening with a goal of crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge and getting to a hotel before midnight. Then up early to push through a no-traffic morning past Baltimore, DC, Richmond and deep into the heart of Virginia. Oh yeah, we also have a 4-month old, a 2 1/2 yr old, and a 4 yr old who will be sharing this adventure with us. Hope they sleep. I need to burn a few more copies of Wonder Pets and Max and Ruby before we leave...

But one thing that is easier this time is planning the route. Google Maps has changed everything with the following enhancements in the past year or so...that really work:

• Adjusting your route - after doing the basic from/to driving directions, you can click on any part of the route and drag it to an alternate route. While you drag, the route changes to recalculate an optimal route through the point you are selecting and displays the distance and time. Google had me going straight down 95, across the Cross Bronx Expressway and George Washington Bridge, and continuing down 95. I know, from folklore and experience, that route is a bad idea unless it's 2am. So I can pull the route over to Nyack and force a route through Tappan Zee--adding a few miles, but bypassing the core New York City nightmare and routing me down the path I recall--the Garden State Parkway all the way down to rejoin the New Jersey Turnpike farther down.
• Traffic prediction - the really new thing I discovered was Google's new predictive traffic feature. You can select the traffic button on a map of a major metro area to display color coded maps showing current traffic conditions (i.e. red lines indicate stop and go). I noticed a link to Live Traffic/change and found I could set the day of week and time to see Google's prediction of traffic delays. I could use this to decide whether it is worthwhile to plot a bypass of Hartford, how much of a detour across Tappan Zee is worthwhile to get me out of the core mess in NYC, and what to expect coming back.

There's much we cannot plan. Maybe the kids will sleep a lot. Maybe there will be much crying. We've done drives to the Adirondacks and sometimes that has been a 5 1/2 hour drive with mostly sleeping. But because this trip involves 4 separate days of travel, it is kind of like the NBA finals--but it's a 4-game series we want to sweep.

The other night, as my wife went to a meeting--one of her rare opportunities to get out and do something for herself versus managing our three kids--I decided to take the kids to Costco to pick up a couple of critical resources we can't run out of: dog food and Enfamil. 6pm to 8pm is the home stretch of time between dinner and bed for our nearly 4-year old, 2-year old, and 3-month old. And a little mini-excursion is better than watching Max/Ruby/Dora/Diego.

But I don't think I had done a solo trip like that before, so I was a little apprehensive. Parking lot...big store...etc. But I moved fast and they stayed in the carriage until I was stuck in line and the fun began as 2-year old Jason had become bored. A couple behind me noticed Marshall who was happily smiling at them and complimented me on how "interactive" he was for 3 months old. I said something like "I've got my hands full tonight," to which the guy followed up with "Where's mom?"

Now I know he didn't mean anything by that, but I realized how different we perceive these situations depending on both the gender of the observer and the participant. I've been guilty of it too. Frantic mom with 3 toddlers crying and whining = mom who can't control her bratty kids. Man with 3 toddlers crying and whining = heroic parent who is pitching in to help. For men at work, people fret over how if Dad is working late he is missing out on quality time with the kids. Mom working late has outsourced her parenting. Or if she leaves early, she's not committed to her job.

It's really nobody's business. We do what works for us and try not to get caught up in imagining what other people might be thinking. But it takes effort to ignore...and I think men have a lot less to ignore because for us, taking care of kids is something "extra" not expected. For working moms--it's two jobs. And for stay at home moms, it is one really big job without the break of being able to go sit in a cube where you can blog if you feel like it and eat a leisurely half-hour lunch without interruption.

Parents who tell parents of newborns to cherish these times as the best of their lives are seriously delusional. But, having been through this a couple of times before, I think it's more a case of amnesia. We don't remember much a few years later.

Maybe it is a result of sleep deprivation and the sleeping cycle. I vaguely recall, and now, re-experience, that for the first 3 to 6 months, we seldom sleep more than 3 or 4 hours at a time. My wife and I take turns...and our babies have been bottle fed, so I can do the midnight/2am feeding and then she gets 4am or so...and then we're awake at 6 anyway...but it is flexible. And it's not like we sleep through the times when the other person is feeding the baby. Sometimes I don't remember who did what the night before. And it all blurs into a stream of semi-consciousness anyway.

Maybe the amnesia is the result of positive reflection. As the kids are older, you look back fondly on the time when they were growing up? It is a miraculous process. But being in the midst of the process is no joy.

It is a different type of hard than people who are not experiencing it can imagine. We are fortunate to have wonderful, healthy children with no serious medical issues. And we are fortunate in our circumstances that allow my wife to stay home full time while I work at a company where family is valued and respected. We are fortunate to have had many friends offer help in many ways. But there is no denying the period of difficulty all parents must go through. And I know, from experience with our two other children, that this time will pass and we will forget what it felt like to walk through life in a bit of a daze. Before you know it, the crying baby is getting ready to start kindergarten. You don't believe that when people tell it to you...but it happens.

The newborn is like the winter solstice--it is the beginning of new life and new things--but it is only the beginning. There are months of dark and snow and cold to get through before the spring begins. And plenty of challenges ahead. The cycles rolls on and we must know that we can love the journey while we suffer the moment at times.