Turning the Corner

At long last we have taught Kiernan to ride a bike!

It's about time, you say. I agree, I reply. It's ridiculous that it has taken this long, but he's got it now and we're pretty excited. A few weeks ago we took him to a nearby park to get him up on his bike without training wheels for the first time in a very long time. Some time ago Gammy and Grance tried to get him to learn to do this. They removed the training wheels on the bike they'd given him and tried to help him learn, but we didn't reinforce their early efforts and Kiernan wasn't really interested in trying, so we stopped pushing the issue. Which, again, I realize was silly.

This time around he is ready. That first day he started to get the hang of it, and a few days later we moved on to another park and invited a few of his friends who can ride. On this outing he got it. One of us would get him started and run along with him holding onto the seat. In no time at all we were jogging along next to him without touching the bike for the most part. It was pretty exciting. He still could not start on his own, and stopping was a move more akin to "abandon ship!" than to stopping a bike and carefully dismounting. When he was ready to stop he'd slow down, swing his leg over and run away from the bike as it fell, reminding me of the way Bill Watterson depicts the relationship between Calvin and his bike. Calvin imagines his bike is an evil force that always out to get him.

A week or so later when Wendy was hanging out with friends I took Kiernan out to the park again to master starting and stopping, which he did fairly quickly. So he had most of the elements of bike riding and just needed more practice. As he rode in the neighborhood I realized I next needed to teach him tighter cornering. He would ride down the sidewalk with his friends. Stop his bike. Get off. Turn it around. And then ride back. That would never do, especially since we weren't allowing him to leave the sidewalk to turn around in the road as I did when I was a kid. Actually, when I was a kid we didn't even have sidewalks. Just five feet of snow. Uphill. Both ways.

So the next weekend it was off to the local college to practice his general skills and learn how to execute tighter turns. I decided a parking lot would be better than a bike path for this, both because it would afford him some space to tool around, and because it would enable him to practice without a bunch of people, including friends, around. I think part of what was holding him back and making him resistant to learning to ride the bike was that his friends were so good at it--especially the much younger brothers of his friends--and he was still learning. "Dude! Why's your dad still holding on to your bike?" That kind of thing will sour a kid on trying pretty quickly.

So we headed to Pierce College and set up a little obstacle course. He took to it right away, as you can see. Now he's making turns and starting and stopping like a pro. And, most importantly, after we finished riding on this day I asked him how he felt about it. "You know what? That was really fun!"

That's when we knew he had turned the corner for good.