Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Bicycle, Bicycle!

 The couple weeks after Christmas we spent a lot of time out at the park with our bikes. This is one of the great things about living in San Diego. You can get a bike for Christmas and be able to take it out and ride it right away. Makenna is a biking maniac these days. She loves to peddle as fast as her legs can go and gets a thrill whipping around corners! Which she loved to do this on her tricycle at 2, so there is no surprise that she is doing it still.
Conner is also a biking fool right now! Since Kellen got his new bike that meant the balance bike went to Conner full time. Con couldn't be more thrilled about this! And let me tell you, the little boy is good. He looks so cute and funny cruising around, pushing with his feet and getting himself on the move fast. He can already balance really good too.
The experience with Kellen on his bike has been an evolving one. Initially Daddy and I were both thinking he was ready to learn to ride without training wheels. He was really good at balancing on the balance bike. And in theory, if you can balance then all you need to do is add in the peddling. Well, this proved to be a bit of a challenge. Mostly because Kellen gets quite distracted while riding. He wants to cruise, to take it easy, to look around at the trees and plants he is passing, or stare off at the kids playing on the playground. Well, this doesn't work well when you are learning to ride a bike. You need to go fast to keep yourself balanced and you need to watch where you are going. Neither of these things were happening. He could balance once you got him going fast enough and you could let him go and he could do it on his own. But he would get side tracked by something and start heading into the bushes without even realizing it.
So, the training wheels went on. We figure it won't hurt to give him some time practicing how to peddle and ride and get going that way first, and then once he is more comfy on the bike we will start practicing training wheel free once again.

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