If you have plans and if you have children, your plans will change. A simple truth that early on in your parenting career you will expend great amounts of energy and experience many moments of frustration trying to rail against. Then eventually you take a step back from the wall you’ve been beating your head against and realize it is energy wasted.

Another simple truth of parenthood is if you decide to include your precious yard apes in an activity you enjoy but don’t intend on amending the activity to account for your children, you are in for less activity and less enjoyment than you set out for.

Just a few pearls of wisdom I’ve picked up along the various hiking and biking trails I’ve drug my children to for a fun filled day of perpetual forward movement. Nothing about a kid’s forward movement is perpetual so these pearls were usually picked up along the trail at a distance much less than I had planned.

My kids are a little older now, so they have the ability to move a little further along the trail than they used to back when I was still delusional enough to think my plan was their plan. They have the ability, but the desire and interest is still lagging, which would be frustrating if I was still in the business of beating my head against the wall.

Recently we went for a bike ride through the Black Hills on the Mickelson Trail. My plan was to ride 30 miles with the kids to a trailhead where my wife would be waiting to pick them up and I would continue kidless another 70 miles. My wife’s plan was to walk about eight miles with our dog before proceeding to the designated trailhead for kid pickup.

I figured it would take about the same amount of time for the kids and me to cover 30 miles on bike as it would for my wife to walk eight miles. I figured wrong.

My wife’s plan of walking eight miles with the dog went off as planned. My plan of riding bike 30 miles with the kids did not. “Why” you ask? Haven’t you been listening? I had the kids with me, she had the company of our agreeable and energetic lab.

It could also be that she’s generally more conservative, some would use the word realistic, in her plans and I tend to hinge on the side of optimistic, some would use the word unrealistic, in my plans. I sincerely doubt that’s the reason for my higher than average rate of amended plans but I just thought I would mention it. I’m going to keep blaming the kids.

My plan first encountered a snag about a mile in, and like the sweater your great aunt made you, it was completely unraveled by mile two. My plan had called for a 12-mph pace and here we were dawdling along, just fast enough to keep from tipping over but not fast enough to keep a chipmunk from relieving itself on my tire.

The old man cracked the whip and told the troops to pick up the pace, so we surged ahead about 30 feet and then had to stop for a drink, clothing adjustment, and to lodge formal complaints.

My daughter informed me she felt sick and didn’t know if she could continue and my son told me he couldn’t go any faster because his bike was hard to peddle. This prompted me to offer up a motivational story of how I road a western-themed banana bike 30 miles in a bike-a-thon when I was six years old to raise money for crippled kids who would have given anything to be able to ride a bike.

While trying to contain the vast amount of motivation this story obviously produced, my son said, “I bet your butt hurt after that. Did I mention my bike’s hard to peddle?”

So, I saw my plan fade away from the seat of my son’s bike, which I rode 20 miles to our amended pick up location. Well, I didn’t really see it from the seat, the bike was too small for me to sit down on and peddle without looking like a circus clown and encountering more discomfort than I cared to endure, so I just stood up and peddled….for four hours.

I’m proud of the kids for the 20 miles they put in. The trail was a little more difficult than I had anticipated when I laid down my optimistic 12 mph pace, but we made it further than I thought we would after the mutiny that occurred at mile two. Don’t tell him, but yes, I agree, my son’s bike is hard to peddle.

In my green horn parent days, I may have been upset with the snail pace change of plans but as a grizzled veteran of many similar campaigns, I was able to step away from the plan and enjoy the ride and the day out and about with the family.

It’s not so bad to step back and let your plans unravel from time to time, because like that old sweater, they probably didn’t fit right anyway.