Simone Has A Bike

We went garage sale hopping two weekends ago and found Simone a bike.
A beautiful purple bike with white wheels and a white seat. It's a
tiny bit too large for her, but she's long enough to stand over the
frame (which was always the ruler we measured bikes by as kids).

We took our treasure home, washed it up real shiny, put the training
wheels back on, and headed over to the nearby school to give it a
whirl in their parking lot.

Simone was pretty interested in biking and started to get the idea of
how to pedal the bike (she gets stuck with the pedals vertical because
she's not pedalling quite fast enough) - but as soon as another car
showed up with two kids and their bikes, she was very excited.

We've since gone biking a couple more times, and just this past
Saturday she had her first fall. We were cycling in the neighbor's
driveway (no cars) and she went off the pavement into the grass. I'd
caught her the couple of times earlier but decided to see what
happened. She quickly came to a stop and teetered to the grassy side
and fell over. Not quite sure what happened, she stood up, started to
pull on the handlebars and then decided that the fall was scary enough
that she wanted Momma and was done with biking for the day.

I know, mean Poppa.

In the past, Mary and I had talked about whether to use training
wheels or not and we both agreed that we'd prefer not to use them.
However, with Simone's current age and disposition toward the bike, I
don't think she'd be interested in the least in the bike if it didn't
have the wheels.

It's a new learning adventure.

All ready to ride