It’s bike ridin’ season, finally. We hope the weather will stay warm and there will be many days of riding ahead of us. The forecast does show temps dipping into the 30s this weekend, so you never know in 2013.
But anyway, it was time to make some moves with the girls. M.’s knees were hitting the handlebars on her old bike. Thus she got an early birthday present of a new bike last Saturday. She loves it, even if it doesn’t have gears like her buddy next door’s new bike. But it does have a hand brake and a cool bell, and that seems to be enough to satisfy her.
The next step is to get C. riding without training wheels. We’ve been casually working with her, but hadn’t done any intense sessions chasing her around. Yet last Saturday, after about five minutes of working with S., she was going 50-60 feet on her own. Now unlike M. a year ago, that doesn’t mean C. is ready to go sans training wheels full-time. She still needs a lot of practice. And frankly I’m a little worried about turning her lose. Where M. was very “Look at me!” when she learned to ride, C. just starts giggling and looking around and increasing her speed without keeping the bike under good control. M. has, amazingly, never crashed. C. is destined for some meetings with mailboxes, sidewalks, parked cars, the fire hydrant across the street, etc. I fear.
And then there’s L.. We’re keeping the training wheels on C.’s bike for now, so she’s riding M.’s old bike when we practice going on two wheels. Eventually we will shift the training wheels to M.’s old bike and that will become L.’s. In the meantime, we let L. hop on C.’s current bike if C. isn’t using it. She’s just barely big enough to reach the pedals, but once she climbs on she has no fear. She’ll charge out into the cul-de-sac and ride with gusto. The problem is she is busy looking back at the parents to make sure their attention is on her. In the process she keeps cutting off the big girls. There hasn’t been a collision yet. But sooner or later one of her sisters or one of the neighbors is going to wipe her out when she doesn’t give them enough time to avoid her. The (kind of) funny part is each time she cuts someone off, she’ll snap her head in my direction, stare at me, and finally say, “What?” as if I’m the one doing something wrong. She’s a piece of work.
Unrelated to bikes, C. was laughing while eating ice cream the other night and started choking. While S. tried to get her to raise her arms and breath, M. screamed, “YOU NEED TO DO THE HEINRICH REMOVER!!!” C. had caught her breath by then so S. and I lost it. That set off another round of giggles by C. and whining by M. to get us to tell her the proper way to say Heimlich Maneuver. When you consider what the act involves, calling it a remover is a pretty solid malapropism.