Today the Wheat family kicked it into gear (as prompted by Catcher's tee shirt). In addition to swimming, which is going okay if you're keeping score, another Wheat family goal for the summer was to get number one and number two riding bikes. On their own.
It turns out that two years and five minutes is the exact amount of time it took for us to teach our eldest to ride a bike. Alex and I weren't liking our odds as instructors until my brother, father of five, told us a little trick about teaching kids to ride a bike: take off the pedals and let them scoot around until they're comfortable with the whole balance thing. Holy crap, it worked. We have seriously been trying to teach Catcher to ride a bike since he was Scout's age, and five minutes after we re-attached his pedals following this little balance experiment, the kid was whizzing around the blacktop like he owned it. Obviously we the parents felt quite the sense of accomplishment.
Once Catcher was king of the two-wheelers, we turned our attention to Scout. She got knocked down, but she got up again. She even rooted herself on by saying "It's okay if you fall. Because you just get back up, and you keep trying." Clearly her mind is in the right place. Her only stumbling block--and, trust me, I don't expect it to keep her hung up too long--is that she's about 1/2 centimeter too short for her bike. Today was the first day she's ever attempted to ride a bike properly, and her fifth birthday is in two days. I'm betting it takes her two days and five minutes to learn get the hang of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment