Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

The back story to this post starts in December when the kids got balance bikes for Christmas from Mommy and Daddy.  They were super excited about trying them out right away, but of course neither of them got the concept the first day out and the novelty quickly died.  Here are some photos I took of the kids on their first day riding, the day after Christmas when we took our brand new bikes over to Nana and Granddad's house to try out. 

I don't think she wanted me to take her picture...

Balancing!  (But not for long.)

Of course the middle of winter isn't the most opportune time to put the bikes to use, but Brian and I would encourage the kids to practice riding them whenever the weather was mild.  They have been riding sporadically over the past three months, with Nathan much more interested then Sarah.  I actually thought it would be the other way around, with Sarah being gung ho about learning to ride (she's more a 'do-er' and less of an observer then Nathan was at her age) and Nathan lagging behind (because he can be a perfectionist and sometimes gets frustrated and gives up).  But Sarah has shown little to no interest in her bike while Nathan kept getting better and better each time he would ride. Brian and I estimate he practiced less then 10 days before he learned how to do this:



We told the kids that when they learned to ride their balance bike, we would let them pick out a new bike - a balance bike with pedals, as Nathan calls it.  But to try and provide more instant gratification, we pulled the training wheels off a (too small for him) bike to see how he would do with pedals. And...



Yeah, Nathan crashed at the end of the video and was upset but not hurt, so no worries. Brian and Nathan headed to Walmart and Target the next day in the hopes of finding something suitable, but they were out of luck unfortunately.  So soon, very soon Nathan will be cruising around on a brand new balance bike with pedals!!