So how did you learn to ride a bike?

[DirtDiva]

My daughter (4) is trying the bike without training wheels now (at her own desire)! She gets too nervous if I try to help her, so her friend sits on the back of the seat and acts like training wheels. She puts her feet down to keep balance and then lifts them up when FishJr isn't looking. FishJr has made it as far as a whole house length on her own! Now, if only she would pedal faster!

OMG! That's so cute - hope you got a picture.



We had one of those trikes with the pedals attached to the front wheel and one of those totally wicked chain trikes with big (to a preschooler, at least) wheels that I started riding probably as soon as I was big enough to reach the pedals.

When I was three, I saw this bike in the toyshop and fell in love at once. She was pink with blue wheels and bars and white tyres, seat, grips and basket. There were plastic flowers attached to the basket and pink and blue streamers coming out of the ends of the handlebars. (I'll dig up a photo for y'al one day, promise!) It was a bike made for a girl, not something she'd have to share with her older brother and not something that had been handed down from him. Every time we went to the mall I'd want to go to the toyshop and then just stand there gaping at that bike; I think I was too starstruck to even beg for it. I was absolutely smitten, and absolutely gobsmacked to find it in the front room on my fourth birthday.

I think I pretty much just got on and rode - not that different from the trikes with the training wheels on. I used to go up and down the drive. I didn't really like turning with the training wheels, yet I was a bit scared of going without , so it took a while for them to come off. Finally, after three or four months I plucked up the courage to have them off and I remember various family members giving me a wee push across the grass and I'd coast then put my feet down. I remember that the time I "got it" my grandfather had given me the push. I think I made him do it a couple more times, just because it was fun, and then I was off!

I went through three (I think) second hand bikes before I got another new one for my thirteenth birthday. I wanted the purple and black "boys" mountain bike (It was fully rigid, but that's what they were called), but my mother did that "what do you want *that* for? It's a boy's bike" thing. Perhaps she still had some vague hope that I was going to grow up into a girly-girl (I was a wannabe tomboy - neither co-ordinated nor cool enough to be the real thing ). Anyway, I ended up with a purple girl's bike, which served me well as a get-about bike for a good 10/11 years until I replaced it with something with a suspension fork...