Hang On and Enjoy the Ride: Cruising on Two Wheels Now

It has been an amazing day for our family! Jack learned to ride his bike on his very first day of trying! Brent and I both said that this is one of our proudest days =). And Jack is pretty proud too, although he is playing all cool and nonchalant about the whole thing.

We woke up this morning to the first spring-like day in for-ev-er. Brent declared that today was the day that Jack was going to learn to ride his bike! Now, Jack is the type who can get frustrated if he can't "get" something in what he deems a reasonable amount of time (unfortunately, he inherited this characteristic from me), so Brent gave Jack a pep talk that set the tone for the afternoon. He told Jack that he wasn't going to ride his bike on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd try, and it wouldn't happen on the 20th or 30th try either, but probably around the 50th try he would start to ride his bike. Another great thing Brent did was to lower the bike seat so that Jack could easily put his feet down to catch himself while learning to balance.

We started practicing. And it was clear that Jack was close, and just needed time to work out the balancing issue. We worked for about 45 minutes with Brent and me taking turns running along side of Jack. And Will was wailing the whole time because his tricycle wouldn't go fast enough and he wanted to ride a big bike too.

So we made a Walmart run to get Jack a bike helmet that actually fit and to get Will a big boy bike (because in his defense, his knees were hitting the handle bars of the tricycle).

And it is a super cool Spiderman bike!

He took right to it and was so proud =).

Then Jack went back to practicing...and something just clicked. I gave him a running start, let go of the bike, and Jack rode about 25 yards looking like he had been riding for weeks! And I looked like a crazy lady as I am hootin' & hollerin' & dancin' in the middle of the street.

Go, Jack, go!

Awesome! We are so proud of our boy!

By the end of the afternoon, Jack had learned how to start, ride, and stop the bike all by himself! Amazing! I know it took at least three weekends of me riding and Mom & Dad running beside me (along with a scraped up elbow and knee for me and shin splints for Mom and Dad), before I learned to ride. I was expecting it to take several weekends for Jack...Nope! The first day Brent was learning to ride (this was before bike helmets), he rode his bike into a parked car and knocked himself out! So I feel very fortunate that Jack learned to ride so quickly without any injuries, since clearly genetics were working against him!