Family Cargo Biking Basics: Commuting, City Living and Fun with Sonja Ralston

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:08
Speaker 2: And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:35
Speaker 3: In this episode, Sarah is going to be interviewing Sonya Ralston about cargo biking and other such urban adventures. And you live in a city with a family and maybe want to have a car light lifestyle. So Sarah, you don't necessarily have a car light lifestyle currently.

00:00:54
Speaker 2: I do not, and I'm not entirely sure. I love what we talked about, and I actually made me want to move more than anything else, because I'm just not sure it would work as well where I live, partly dispur very unpredictable weather reasons, There'd be so many commutes. When you're like, well, I can't leave because I get struck by lightning. But no, it was super eye opening this interview, and I think you're all going to enjoy it. But I thought we could talk about whether we have biking playing a role in our current lives or households.

00:01:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we own bikes for all of us, and you know, at points in the last few years we have gone on bike rides with all the kids. So Michael and I bike. The older four kids can now bike independently, but for a while we had Alex on what's called a tag along, which is another seat and another wheel that you put on. You kind of take your seat off and hook it on and then put your seat back on, so it's like a three wheel bike with one and you know, they're all in parallel and the kid can pedal too, and it's actually kind of nice because like you're getting a little boost, you know, like a even if they're only boosting your effort by like ten percent, it's more than you would have as opposed to the burley, which is what the little kid would ride in. So it's what Henry would ride in, which is the carrier that goes behind it, you know, and that's obviously dead weight because the kid isn't pedaling anything. But yeah, so we would go with five older bike, five people biking, one tagging along on the back, one in the burley. We make for quite a little possession when we do. We have to take two cars when we do this because they don't all fit on one car, you know. So it's kind of an ordeal, which is one reason we haven't done it in a while. But maybe we will. Maybe we can convince everyone to do it. I think the older kids have started to beg off some of it, that maybe they'd be willing to go on their own biking somewhere, so we had to figure that one out. Yeah, some sort of biking adventure trip might be appealing. So we also all have bikes. Genevieve does not ride by herself yet without training wheels. I'm like really awaiting that to happen. I think it will be soon.

00:02:54
Speaker 2: Just five and a half. We had varying a lot of variants in the ages of the kids learning to do this. Cameron was by far the quickest at four. He was like, I'm done, I'm fine, see yeah, and everyone else is taking their time. But actually Josh and Cameron go Mountain biking fairly frequently, like they go on these crazy trails or on the quote unquote belodrome where we live. So there is biking happening, and we have definite family fantasies of someday doing some sort of like curated biking centric trip, like going to Vermont and like staying at like a B and B and then like doing little biking adventures or something like that. So hey, if you have REX for such a such a thing, let me know. Biking plays a role in a lot of the kids who go to the elementary school right near where we live, because there's a terrible car line and yet the bike line is super quick. So in the months when the weather's good, there are lots and lots of kids that bike to school, and I think it's actually much much more efficient for their families, whether the parents go with them with the younger kids, or whether it's fourth and fifth graders, you know, just going themselves. Pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah, bikes are great.

00:03:58
Speaker 4: Say.

00:03:58
Speaker 3: I've taken two longer bike trips. One was a trip through the Laire Valley in France, where we would bike between wineries and castles and other such things. It was with one of Arii's subcontractors or whatever. Of course, I realized once I did that that ARII was contracting with local bike tour companies, and so you could just try to find local bike tour companies. And so when Michael and I went to Vietnam in the fall of two thousand and five, I want to say, we did a bike trip through there and saw a lot of villages and cool things like that, and just hired a local company to take us around and they did the same trip that any of the big tour operators would have done, and at a much more affordable rate. So you know, give that tip to look into for people who are considering it. Google lets you find anything these days totally cool.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: Well, Sonya is going to really teach us some of the practical ins and outs of how you might meet biking kind of a more central part of your family's everyday lifestyle. So I think this will be a really useful conversation for a lot of us. All Right, I am here with Sonya Ralston, who is an attorney based in DC, and she sent an email that both Laura and I like instantly wrote each other. We get a few pitches, but this one we were both really really excited about. And interestingly, Sonia suggested we talked to an expert, and we were both at the exact same reaction, which is like, no, we want to talk to her because her story of how she got into biking with her family, I think is going to be as informative or more informative than hearing some biking expert talk about it in theory. So I will stop talking now, and Sonya, can you go ahead and introduce yourself?

00:05:44
Speaker 4: Hi, Sarah, Yeah, I'm Sonya Ralston. I'm an attorney for the federal government. I live on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and I have two kids who are almost six and three and a half.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: Excellent, And so this story begins. Actually we have something in common. We both spent time at Duke. But you said that you did not have biking as much of a part of your life when you were there. When did you first get into biking to begin with?

00:06:12
Speaker 4: So, when I was a kid, I actually biked everywhere. I biked five miles to high school every day and back, which was great exercise, And then not so much when I was in college and law school. But then when I moved to DC, we had just gotten the bike share, and I started biking to work pretty regularly because it was just more convenient than the bus from where I lived. And I did that. We moved and it was so convenient. I did that off and on for you know, five or six years, and then when I got pregnant, I had to stop, and so I had this like hiatus of being pregnant, having a baby, and then we just didn't bike very much. And then in the pandemic, you know, I had my child turned one, and we really wanted to like go out more. You had one of those trailers that you pull behind a bike, and we would use that and it worked pretty well. But we don't have a garage. We live in a row house, and so it was like a pain to You have to like collapse it down and then kind of stow it somewhere, and so it's like a whole five minute up and down each time you want to use it, which with little kids like they by the time you got it up, they were like halfway down the street. And so a colleague of mine was commuting to work and dropping her kids at school on a cargo bike, and I was really intrigued and I talked to her about it and did a lot of research and then we bought one. And so that was in August of twenty twenty one, when we were really facing the like having to get our older daughter to school. She started pre k at the public school. It's about a mile from our house, which is a little too far to walk, like a and the like the one way streets, and the traffic was really bad, so it didn't make sense to drive, and there's no bus route, and she couldn't ride a bike by herself at that time, so we decided to go with the cargo bike.

00:08:13
Speaker 2: All right, I have so many questions before I let you keep going. My first question is, when you said bike shared, do you mean like a city bike type of a situation?

00:08:21
Speaker 4: Yes, okay, so they call it Capitol bike share here, got it?

00:08:24
Speaker 2: Okay, So well bike you can borrow and then put back and you pay for it as you go. My second question is because I actually don't know the rules on this, because I never had to ask, who didn't fly to me, what are the rules around or the suggestions around biking and pregnancy.

00:08:38
Speaker 4: Do you know? Yeah, it's just that you're not bike when you're pregnant biking in the same category with skiing and other things where you might essentially fall and sustain and impact injury. It's probably overly cautious, but I don't know.

00:08:57
Speaker 2: No, I get it. I wouldn't ski when I was well pregnant, I mean personally, and I did run while pregnant, and I did fall while running while pregnant, and still ran with subsequent pregnancies. But it is probably overall a much lower risk activity compared to biking, which still isn't high risk, but just the chances of taking like what would be a mild tumble that was being more catastrophic. Okay, I get it. I was just curious whether there were like official recommendations as to like which trimesters, et cetera. So basically, if you can avoid it, don't do much biking while pregnant.

00:09:26
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:09:26
Speaker 2: And then my third extremely ignorant question is, and this is for the listeners as well, what exactly is a cargo bike?

00:09:34
Speaker 4: I'm so glad you asked. So a cargo bike is like a regular bike, but bigger, and there are kind of two main types. There's a kind of European style that has a basket in the front that is either still a two wheel or sometimes a three wheel bike with like two wheels in the front and one in the back, and that's called a box bike. And then there's a midtail or long tail bike, which is what we have, where the back part of the bike is just longer, so the wheelbase between the two wheels is longer than on a traditional bike, and that space is then taken up with you have a longer chain, a longer distance between the pedals and the beer wheel, and there's a big space at the back where you put like a rack and then some you know, various accessories that you can put on it. And the difference between a midtail and a long tail is just how much longer it is.

00:10:34
Speaker 2: Got it okay? And logistically with the cargo bike, where and how exactly did the kids go?

00:10:41
Speaker 4: So the kids go on the back. If you have a box bike, they go in the box, but we have the long tail and so they go on the back. We have a rack on the top of the metal and then it has padded seats on it, and then there are little like bars that come out at the bottom, little like footrest paths, and then there's a cage Essentially they call it ours is called a hootie on some they call it monkey bars, But it's essentially a metal handrail box that goes around the kids so that they don't fall out fall off.

00:11:19
Speaker 2: Oh okay, that makes sense. So they're like riding almost like a little carriage or something like that.

00:11:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's kind of like riding in a like amusement park ride, totally hands and arms inside the box.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: Do they enjoy it, like, do they have fun in it?

00:11:36
Speaker 4: Or?

00:11:36
Speaker 2: I mean the novelty probably has worn off at this point.

00:11:40
Speaker 4: I think they enjoy it. I think they So, they certainly enjoy it a lot more than the trailer. They didn't like being in the trailer because it's low to the ground you can't really see anything, and in the on the cargo bike, they can see everything. It's like being out in the world, and so they really enjoy that. My son right now is really into vocal swagon beetles, and so every time we see what mom a bug and he's just like so excited about it. But like that's something that you couldn't do in the trailer. Also, it we'd be too far away and I couldn't hear him, so it works out really well, so.

00:12:13
Speaker 2: You can actually hear them, they can talk back to you while you're Oh, that's really cool. How do you feel about the safety do you feel and is there data on that. I'm sure you've probably looked at this.

00:12:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I don't know that there's specific data on cargo bikes versus like biking in general. But where we live in DC is one of the top five cities in the US for bike safety. We have a lot of bike infrastructure and more every day, and I think it's one of the great things about getting more families involved in biking is that the more people who are bike riders, the more bike infrastructure there gets to be because the more of us and we have a lot of protected bike lanes here where the lanes are set off from the traffic by stanchions, pillars, or sometimes even between the curve and the parking lane, which is really quite safe, and so that's really nice. On the kind of bike that we have, it rides just like a regular bike, so it doesn't take any getting used to the one we have. We chose because it has a smaller rear wheel and so the center of gravity is a little lower, which makes it when the kids kind of wiggle around, you're not falling over, so it's a little more stable. I think it is as safe as riding on a regular bike, and that depends obviously on your comfort zone. But here in DC, at least I feel really safe about it because we do have such good infrastructure.

00:13:41
Speaker 2: I could see that. And in terms of like safety equipment, obviously you're wearing a helmet as a rider. Are the kids generally helmeted up to Yes, you're not it.

00:13:49
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, we all wear helmets and we have that's pretty lights. We have lights on the bike, so the helmets and the lights, it's kind of our safety equipment and a bell. But otherwise we have kind of weather equipment, so we kind of invest it in some more warm weather athletic where the same kind of things you would wear to go running in the winter, we have to ride on the bike in the winter. So we also have some like toasty gloves that keep your hands both flexible and warm, which is nice, and then some lightweight rain gear. You know, we don't bike when it's pouring, but if it's just a drizzle, we'll still go.

00:14:31
Speaker 2: That way makes sense. And then so tell me take me on a journey because I'm also curious, like, yeah, like tell me how it is getting out the door. And then also when you get to your destination, how do you store your bike? Lock it safely, et cetera. So take me on a bike ride.

00:14:46
Speaker 4: We do this every morning. We out the door just as you would if you were growing in a car, except the kids put on their helmets and we go to the bike. We seat on the back has like a front and a back, and the kids both prefer to sit in the front, so we alternate days about whose day it is to sit in the front, and they just hop on. They can at this point both climb on themselves, so sometimes they like a little rocket ship, you know, and then we ride. Our bike now has an electric motor on it. It didn't when we bought it, but I converted it to have an electric e assist, which our commute home from downtown goes up Capitol Hill, which is kind of steep, but that makes it a lot easier to kind of like stay with the flow of traffic and the small places where we have to be on the road, and also to arrive at work, like not sweaty when it's ninety degrees. But then we just, you know, we set off. It's eight minutes from our house to the school. You know, we just kickstand the bike in front of the school and hop the older one off and in she goes. We attached the helmets onto the cage in the back so they don't have to carry them around all day. And then it's down Capitol Hill to the daycare, which is another up twelve or fifteen minutes. Lock it up to a street post outside the daycare and drop off the little one and then ride over to our office, which is essentially one block away from the daycare. Our office building has a parking garage in the basement that is only you can only park your car there if you are a very fancy, high up person in our department. But you can park your bike there no matter who you are. And so there's some bike racks and we just park there. One thing about cargo bikes is they're a little bit bigger. I mean, they're definitely bigger, and they're also wider with the cages than a traditional bike. So I actually don't park in the bike rack proper. I just park it next to the rack and lock the wheel. I figure if we have people stealing things out of our government garage. We have bigger problems.

00:16:58
Speaker 2: Out of a corporate garage with fancy people. You're like, okay, you must have needed it that bad. I get it. Okay, that's funny. So tell me more about the e assist feature. How easy is it to like add on to an existing bike, and like how easy does it make your ride? Like, are you like zero effort? Can you like decide to turn it off if you want exercise? Tell me more about the eocist.

00:17:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there's different kinds. I think if you're looking to buy a new cargo bike, most of the options you'll find are ecist in one way or the another. Because most cargo bikes are really heavy. They're usually about seventy pounds, which is more than twice a regular bike. There are some lighter weight ones. We just got a second non eesist one that's really light that doesn't need that. But I will say it was not the easiest thing I have ever done. But YouTube videos are amazing and you can find one to instruct you on how to do anything. And so it was a couple of specialized tools to take apart the bottom bracket of the bike, which is the axle that holds the pedals together and from there it just kind of clips in. And the one we have is a pure assist, whereas there are some others that have like a throttle which is more like a motorcycle that you can kind of rev it up even if you're not pedaling. Ours only amplifies your pedal and so it rides very smoothly. It rides just like a regular bike. You just go faster for the amount of effort you're putting in.

00:18:43
Speaker 2: Awesome, and you.

00:18:44
Speaker 4: Can turn it off. You can turn it. It has like nine levels. You can turn it all the way up. I don't think I've ever beenen with it all the way up, but I usually have it at like level two. But you can turn it all the way off if you want to, like really power it through. It adds between the battery and the motor about ten pounds to the bike. So between the seventy pounds that it started with and then plus two kids, you know, you're up to several hundred pounds of stuff that.

00:19:08
Speaker 2: You're moving around, So by that point you need the system.

00:19:12
Speaker 4: It helps.

00:19:13
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Oh that's so cool. I want to ask about cost. How expensive I think I've read that these are fairly expensive, obviously not car level, but give us some numbers.

00:19:27
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think you hit on it that whether it's expensive, y're cheap depends on what you're comparing it to. And if you think of it as a replacement for a second car, it's super cheap. A new bike will run about two thousand dollars to like five thousand dollars maybe a little more when you get the accessory package, depending on how fancy a brand you go with. We've got two now that we're both less than one thousand dollars used. There are most places, including here, and I think a lot of other is have a family Biking Facebook group, which is a great way to find a bike and find people who are also into this. People are really excited about it, and so there's no problem getting somebody to like let you test to ride their bike if you're trying to figure out which kind is right for you. People are very generous, so that works out.

00:20:20
Speaker 2: Well, Oh that's awesome. What about the EIS Does that add additional cost?

00:20:25
Speaker 4: Yeah? So, I think it for the places where you can buy a new one optional, theis is about one thousand dollars more. When we edited it ourselves, it was about seven hundred dollars to get what we wanted. I will say that all in I think the bike, the esis, the gear, the accessories that even we got new helmets, like less than we would pay for a year of parking in downtown.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: Wow, oh my god. All of a sudden, I'm like parking what? And then I realized, yes, people who live in cities have to pay for parking, right. Obviously I don't, so I don't think about that. But yes, that's a huge expense. I thought you were going to say gas or car payments or something like that. So I mean it could be a huge savings.

00:21:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean on an ongoing basis, it's certainly less than that too. And we have a car that we drive when we go further places. But when we're going anywhere in like in the city, we ride the bike. Mostly. We ride to the ballpark. We like to go to baseball games. We ride. There are like two dozen playgrounds within a ten minute bike ride of our house, which our kids really love. We ride to the Smithsonian, we ride to the library. We ride. It's a swimming pool. We can go lots of places.

00:21:43
Speaker 2: Have you ever ended up like stranded somewhere because there was like a lightning storm and you didn't want to ride back?

00:21:49
Speaker 4: No, there was one time when we were riding home and the chain on the bike broke at the bottom of Capitol Hill, of course, at the bottom, right, of.

00:21:57
Speaker 2: Course, at the bottom. Oh my goodness, how did you handle it?

00:22:02
Speaker 4: Well, we just got off and walked. I mean, it's kind of like a broken escalator, right, it still works. So my son rode on the back and I walked to the bike up the hill and it was a little slow, but we made it. And then I learned how to fix a bike chain on YouTube.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: Have you become pretty good at other parts of upkeep and maintenance?

00:22:23
Speaker 4: I think so.

00:22:24
Speaker 2: We certainly.

00:22:25
Speaker 4: We still have it serviced about once a year just to make sure everything's tip top, But the general maintenance is really easy. Just some chain move and checked the tires like once a month, and otherwise I have replaced the chain and we've added the lights, but it's none of it's super complicated.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: One last Verde bike centric question, which is have you ever taken the bikes on vacation?

00:22:52
Speaker 4: We have, so we are actually going on vacation next week to the Outer Banks, North Carolina, and we take our bikes to go from our beach house to the beach, which is about three quarters of a mile, so you could walk it. It's not unwalkable, but with our kids, you know, the first year we went, we pulled them in a wagon and that got really tiresome. So now with the bikes, we just kind of load up and two minutes later we're there and we kind of locked the bikes together the boardwalk. And has it been a problem that. One thing I would say about that is that if you want to take the bike with you, the full like heavy cargo bikes are too heavy to carry on a rear mounted rack. If you have like a toe hitch rack, they can ride on that. But on the kind that just like clips onto the rear trunk of your car, they're too heavy for that.

00:23:53
Speaker 2: Wow. So you have the other kind, the toe hitch okay.

00:23:57
Speaker 4: And we have we have a lighter bike. Oh okay, that can go on the thing.

00:24:02
Speaker 2: Got it? So you brought your lander bikes on the trip.

00:24:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, So that's what we did this year. Last year we brought the We still have the pulp behind trailer. So last year we bought the trailer.

00:24:10
Speaker 2: Wow, So there is like I feel like the intimidating part to me isn't the actual riding, although that's probably a learning curve in and of itself. But it's like it's like the gear, but at the same time, once you start doing it, it's like you're just adding on and you get used to it and it's doable, and it sounds like it's been a source of like joy as well as convenience for you guys.

00:24:28
Speaker 4: It's great. I mean, you get outside, you get exercise, fresh air, you can go anywhere, no traffic, no parking, no waiting in the carpool line, you just zip right up to the front and you're good.

00:24:42
Speaker 2: That's pretty amazing. All right, Well, we're going to include our always listener favorite regular People segment Day in the Life. So take us through a little bit with a day in the life looks like in your household, and you can include any related bike type stuff because I know that does fit into your everyday life.

00:25:03
Speaker 4: It is. So on a typical school day, we are up, our kids get up at actually I have no idea what time because they very mercifully stay in their brooms until seven thirty, at which time I come get them ready. My husband makes breakfast. We eat about eight o'clock and then sometimes it's a bit more playtime, and otherwise we're kind of getting ready with our shoes and sun's green and everything to get out the door. We leave at eight thirty five for bike ride, usually at the office at about nine, and then work until five fifteen, do it backwards and pick them up before after care closes at six. My husband usually makes dinner, so he has that on the table when we get home. We eat about six, and then the kids play for yeah, twenty minutes or so, and we start our bedtime. Our daughter. We stagger it, so the little one goes to bed about seven fifteen and our daughter is like out at eight, and then we go to bed pretty earlyly.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: I hear you. I'm with you.

00:26:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not real complicated, but it works for us.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: It sounds lovely, and I love that the bikes are just now like taken for granted. It's just like part of your normal routine. Well, thank you so much for coming on and teaching everybody about cargo bikes and e asis bikes and how we can work bikes into our urban lifestyle to make things not only more cost effective and environmentally friendly, but perhaps easier and fun too. So I really loved learning about this, and I'm trying to figure out how well we have bikes, but we need to use them more more as transportation and not just as recreation. So I'm inspired by this episode. Thank you so much for coming on. Sonya Hi, pleasure.

00:26:58
Speaker 4: I have a love.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: Yes, I was just going to say, except I forgot to ask you for love of the week. So what is your love of the week.

00:27:06
Speaker 4: My love of the week is silicone scar gel tape.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: What tell me about this?

00:27:12
Speaker 4: So our daughter recently had a crafting accident with some sisters and had to get stitches. But now that she dishes are out healing that she has a scar, and so we have these. It's like kind of like a bandage, but you can reuse it. It's sticky on the one side and it's silicone, and so it goes over the scar and it helps the scar heal and recede and not be so visible. I learned about it a couple of years ago when I had a scuba diving accident.

00:27:44
Speaker 2: Wow, I did not know about this stuff. That is good to know.

00:27:48
Speaker 4: Hopefully well how prosive that she doesn't have a long term scar, but.

00:27:55
Speaker 2: That is awesome. I feel like I need to get this, like you need to order it ahead of time. You don't want to be rushing up to get it like the injury. So part of me just wants to go straight and get some I will go with a similarly medical love of the week. I'm glad that they waxed that the orthodonists gave out in the nineties is still going strong. Like it's just both got braces and I've all got her second round of braces. Can't forgot his first round of braces. And I was like, oh, it's wax and one of my kids was already needing to use it.

00:28:22
Speaker 4: Because those things heard and yeah, I remember those days.

00:28:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, not a lot seems to have changed, but they'll get through it. Although I feel like the kids wear braces for a lot less time. They sometimes have to do multiple rounds, but kids are not like generally embraces for years and years as they were when I was growing up, So I guess they've made some improvements. That's great, awesome, Well, thank you, thank you for reminding me about the love of the week. I actually had thought about it just as you were saying it, but he could not leave that out. Sonya, thank you so much for coming on. And I hope that if listeners have questions they can write them into show notes and maybe Sonya will make an appearance and answer them. Thank you really appreciate it all right, stay on, well.

00:29:09
Speaker 4: We are back.

00:29:10
Speaker 3: That was awesome learning all about urban living and biking and how the carl like lifestyle might actually work when you have kids. That you don't necessarily have to move to the suburbs and buy a car if you don't want to, but that you can make it work on maybe one car, or only having a car part of the time, if you make use of other things like bikes to transport your kids around. So very cool things to consider there. So today's question comes from a listener who is trying to figure out how to get her four year old to take medicine. And this child needs to take let's say it's antibiotics twice a day or something. And generally, you know, you want to be positive and praise what works and not what doesn't. But if the kid literally does need to take their medicine, twice a day. This is, you know, something you have to deal with, So how do you get young children to take medicine?

00:30:00
Speaker 2: So, Sarah, what do you have for us? So we have run into this in the past with various antibiotic concoctions that maybe didn't taste with the kid wanted them to taste like. And our biggest winning strategy has actually been the ice cream chaser. So basically we do tend to explain to the kid exactly what the medicine is for. Obviously that's not going to work in an eighteen month old, but I believe this person's child is like almost four, and so they might understand, like, explain what an infection is. Explain how you know, if an infection doesn't get the treatment it needs, then they can get sicker and need worse tasting medicine. You know, make it. Tell whatever version you want to tell, but to really explain why this is important and why it's not just for fun or you're not being mean for no reason. But the ice cream chaser has been great, like literally having to pick out whatever kind of ice cream and then once they've taken, have a spoon of it ready because the thought is like they don't like the taste in their mouth, But if they know as soon as they've swallowed it, they can then put like the most delicious flavor, their favorite flavor of ice cream in their mouth right afterwards. For us, that has worked pretty well. And then finally, like there are sometimes depending on which pharmacy you're getting at, whether it's pre mix versus something they have to make, sometimes there's actually different flavorings they can use, and that can make a difference with some kids. So, particularly if it's a compounding pharmacy, you might say, you know, I know the standard is like the pink stuff, but is there other flavor options? And definitely if you're able to, maybe have to make a few, make it in a few batches with different flavors and see which one your kid will tolerate.

00:31:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say the the amoxiscillin wasn't so bad. The augmentum was much worse. So you know, not that you want to threaten your kid with that, but if they have to go to the next level of antibiotics for the resistant infection, you're you're not.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: Going to be happier. I'll put that out there sometimes there, and this is this is a little bit dire, but like sometimes there is an injectable alternative, like I mean this is specific for like treating your infections and strep throat, but there are some im injections that sometimes can sub for a whole round of oral And I've had some parents actually tell me they prefer that like thirty seconds of pain to you know, two weeks of like battles. So ask your provider if it really comes to that and you truly can't do it or it is causing hour long battles, find out if there also might be a quick and somewhat painful but very time limited option.

00:32:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, essentially, because then you have the kids who need to learn to swallow pills, which is also challenging. You know obvious say very little kids can't really do it. But I've had people talk about, you know, teaching their kids with like tic TACs right that you know, you have a big bunch of tick tacks, and like say, can you get it down without chewing it?

00:32:37
Speaker 2: Can you get it?

00:32:37
Speaker 3: I'm able to sit here with water and just keep trying to learn that skill. I don't remember when I learned to swallow. Yeah, it was you know when you start having headaches or something as a teenager, and they have to learn to take various things.

00:32:50
Speaker 2: It's a skill. Taking medicine as a life skill. Yeah, it's kind of a survival skill too, so important to learn at some point.

00:32:57
Speaker 3: Important to learn at some point. But yeah, the spoonful of sugar may and help help the medicine go down. So I like the ice cream idea.

00:33:04
Speaker 4: Well.

00:33:04
Speaker 3: This has been best of both worlds. Sarah was interviewing Sonia Ralston about the car light lifestyle in the city. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:33:16
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

00:33:23
Speaker 1: Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.

00:33:28
Speaker 3: This has been the best of both worlds podcasts.

00:33:30
Speaker 1: Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.