Summer Days

Learning to Ride a Bike
It felt like a summer day. It's not summer yet, not officially. But it was too nice to be shut up in the house. Well maybe I didn't have a problem with being shut up in the house after getting off from work at 8 a.m. If I didn't dive under the covers immediately, a few hours of knitting would have been okay too! But, BUT, with an 5-year-old Grandson who thinks he's a Power Ranger--Spiderman--Ironman, well you get the idea, it would have been cruel to have kept him in the house even with his favorite PBS kid's shows on. Having just graduated kindergarten, school is out. So after running some errands first, I let him take his scooter out and we went for a nice walk stopping first at Grandpa's to see the bike that he had put together for Khalil. Men! Not to my surprise it wasn't the typical bike, in my mind, for an almost 6-year-old to learn on. The brake is on the handle bar. There was no training wheels. But Khalil loved it and Grandpa and Uncle Wesley both took turns running up and down the block with Khalil in his first attempts to ride it. I've since talked Grandpa into putting one training wheel on it, like we did for our son, Khalil's uncle Wesley when he was the same age and learning for the first time. With one wheel, once he got tired of leaning and being off balance, his body automatically started balancing. With Khalil having not to worry about balance, he can focus on steering the bike and learning to stop, using the hand brake.