Riding Her Bike

She asked me to take this picture of her and "send it to all the grandmas and grandpas" (so this will be in your email.)

This summer she has been working on learning to ride a bike. We initially bought her a 16" bike (they fit in the stores) but the one we bought online was about 1/2-1" too tall for her to ride. So, I began my quest to find a used 12" bike (I certainly didn't want to buy another new one). So, I found one for $1 at a rummage sale and my prego brain didn't register that it didn't come with training wheels until we were in the car driving away.

So, we tried to use the training wheels for the 16" bike, but they were not adjustable ones so they didn't work out. Bah! So, continues the quest. Then I found the above bike at a rummage sale for $5, complete with training wheels but was missing the tube from the back tire. No problem! We just swapped the tire from the dollar bike since they were pretty much exactly the same. I wasn't going to get a tube for $1 (it would cost more than that) and it was much easier to swap out tires that have to install a tube. Plus we took the wheel beads off the dollar bike and put them on this one. So, for $6, this is her 12" bike.

She was having some trouble figuring it out (partly because pedaling in reverse was the brake). So, we brought the trike out for her to learn to pedal better on. Some friends told me that when their kids had trouble it helped to have them learn on a Big Wheel (which I did pick one up at a rummage sale, but she wasn't with so she wasn't fitted for it and it's too big for her - we'll just save it for later) or a trike. She never had much interest in actually pedaling her trike before, but she understood it would help her learn to ride a bike so she was motivated.

Pretty much every day we go out to practice riding. She really wants to be able to ride her bike while I walk to the park, which would not be a bad idea since the last month of pregnancy I don't know how well I will be able to get up/down on my bike & pedal us down there & back.

So, next year she will probably be able to use the new 16" bike and baby boy will probably have a purple 12" bike to start out on too, because I would rather save my money to buy a bike they will use for 2-3 years rather than something they will outgrow in one year.