Afterall, we're working on strengthening bike culture, on making cycling safe and fun and accessible, on offering the next generation all kinds of opportunities to be enviro heroes, right?  If we give our kids cars and trucks to play with, why are we surprised when they want to drive instead of ride?

Jasper got some awesome playmobil cyclists for his birthday last summer.  One of the riders has a bike jersey.  Another has a helmet.  And the last one has a great basket for picking up groceries on the way home.  How fun is that!

When Jasper opened his gift, I imagined all the fun games he'd play.  Like urban design, bike commuting, bike racing, bike crashes, bike repairs, bike parade.  He actually did play some of those games that afternoon.  But the next morning he put the riders aside and went back to building lego space ships and redesigning megablock trucks.  A few times I set the cyclists up beside his lego to see if he might start playing with them again.  But he wasn't interested.  

I was at a workshop recently with Dutch cyclist Angela van der Kloof of Mobycon, who was speaking with Ottawa area cyclists about making our community more bike friendly.  It was a cold winter night with freezing rain.  Angela began the evening by saying how surprised she was to be speaking to a packed room about cycling.  Angela said that for her and for many Dutch people, cycling is so normal that it would be strange to gather to speak about cycling.

Maybe cycling is so normal for Jasper that he's not interested in playing pretend cycling games.  Or maybe he just loves lego.  Either way, what he plays with is his choice.  So I've set the playmobil cyclists up in my office, beside my amazing "I love my bike" coffee mug created by a friend who's a local potter and fellow family cycling enthusiast. 

But if Jasper or Anna Sierra or any of their friends ever does decide to play with the little cyclists, I promise to share.