bike babe

Well, there comes a time in every dad's life when he decides that the training wheels have to come off. That could be a metaphorical statement or a literal one. This week it was both.

It could have been on Thursday night when I heard Laine call from the bathroom...

"DAD! Help! I sat too close to the edge of the toilet seat and the pee sprayed all over! Don't worry though, Dad, I did get some into the toilet."

ALSO on Thursday night it was time for the real training wheels to come off of Lainey's bike. In truth they had been off for about a week or two and we had been going the traditional two-wheel training route of running behind her trying to help her balance. We did this a couple of ways. For about 5 minutes I ran behind her holding the seat. That was totally lame so I figured out how to lash a broom stick to her bike so I wouldn't have to bend over. This was much better for me but it was no help to Laine at all.

For some of you this is no secret, but it turns out this is a really lousy (and long and painful) way to teach a kid to ride a bike. After a few days all we had accomplished was some good exercise for me and one cranky and discouraged little girl.

One night I decided to get online and see if I could find any tips people had put out there for teaching kids to ride bikes. That's when I struck gold. I found a LOT of sites with tips, tricks, and suggestions. Many of the sites were the same old trash but SOME were totally awesome. (speaking of totally awesome I hope you knew that Super Dell is running for governor and I hope that you read some of his material. It is comedic genius - he just doesn't know it.)

There were many that had a lot of similar suggestions to the technique we eventually settled on and in the end I paid 15 bucks for an online book (aka PDF) that outlined a method. Next to my first Van Morrison album this is the best 15 bucks I've ever spent. www.ridingmadeeasy.com

Many of you already know this teaching method. Shame on you for not telling more people about it. For those of you that haven't heard of it - it is amazing. The online book doesn't have anything completely unique but it was far better organized in terms of steps to take and overall information than any of the free sources.

We started by taking the pedals off of an older bike so Lainey could just scoot around. The first 20 minutes she was a little bored and confused. The second 20 minutes she was starting to get excited. We took a couple of breaks for apple dippers - oh and one other super funny thing that happened to Romney which I'll tell you about below but by the end of an hour and after several different games and contests she could glide across the parking lot and looked like this. Here is the end of day one after about 1 hour.




Day two she was ready for the pedals back on the bike. There was one last step in the book but by this time she didn't care what I had to say. She was now confident enough that she was going to learn by trial and error and she was doing awesome! We spent about an hour working on it on day two - this was after about 30 minutes that day.




As soon as there was a break in the weather on Saturday she wanted out of the house again. No more training needed. She was still riding an undersized bike for a little confidence but she was out of the shoot and looking great! You can't hear the audio very well but she likes to whistle while she rides and at the end of this she says - "dad, I'm going to run into this tree on purpose, watch!"

Crazy kid. Here is what she looked like on our first offical family bike ride around the neighborhood.




"What, are you kidding? We got us a family here!"
(Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona)

Romney, on the other hand, was looking for a way out of the family and kept trying to climb the fence to get to the playground. Finally, here's the last funny story about Romney that I promised above. As you can see from the apple dipper break we had one of Lainey's friends along with us for the evening. She was great and helpful (although Laine was a little jealous and REALLY wanted to be able to ride like her friend that is two years older than her.) Anyway - Laine's friend lives accross the street from the parking lot we were practicing in and so at one point we ran over to her house for a potty break. While we went into the house, Romney headed for the backyard playset. A few minutes later Rom came running around the corner soaking wet and crying. He has this problem with turning on the hose at our house, so I asked him what happened and he insisted that he didn't turn on the hose and that it turned on all by itself. This didn't seem like a very accurate account but he was upset so I didn't want to push it at the moment. I went to the backyard to turn off whatever he had gotten into and found that nothing was on. I follwed the hose back to the sand box only to find a motion activated sprinkler used to scare away cats from the sand box. It sprayed hard and fast! I started laughing so hard. Obviously, Romney had gone straight for the sand and sure enough, the water had turned on all by itself and totally nailed him! So funny. I bet they don't have many cats using their sand box as a litter box! and no sneaky neighbor boys either...