Easy Rider

Dutiful parents that we are, when Frodo and Samwise hit the age of 5, we bought them bicycles (Huffy Rock-Its, as I recall). In both cases, their excitement and interest soon waned--in a matter of hours, really.

The presence of training wheels, their parents, and as much safety gear as a NFL quarterback could not dissuade either of them from their conviction that they'd fall over and/or off the instant they started moving; causing several serious, permanent, life-changing injuries. That conviction soon gained some inertia and it became impossible to get them on the bikes.

Tho' to be honest, we probably could've tried harder. But given the neighborhoods we lived in around that time, it was hard to blame us. Even not considering that, it wasn't like our kids would ever ride their bikes as much as we did as kids. This was seen by my father as some sort of great character flaw--mostly ours (but partially the boys'). He'd occasionally make some sort of effort to teach them to ride--whether they wanted to or not.

Which is all just a rambling, should be edited preamble to this:

Last week, out of the blue, Samwise approached me, wondering if I'd dig Frodo's newer bike out of the garage, so he could try to ride it (At some point, Frodo'd picked up a "bigger kid" bike, which, thanks to its larger size, collected dust faster than his first). I assured him that was a good idea (it was), but that'd be something I needed to think about (I almost promptly forgot it) and see if I could get him a helmet (forgot about that, too), and we'd pick up the idea over the weekend (we didn't).

Thankfully, over the weekend, he brought it up to his mom while I was out running errands. TLomL grabbed the bull by its horns and got the bike out and ready. Within fifteen minutes he was riding the thing--not well, but he wasn't going knees over teakettle. Yesterday he spent hours, hours riding up and down the block in 97° heat(110° with the wind chill), burning off more calories than I took in last week.

He had a blast, as you can see--and plans on doing it again today, and to watch him, you'd have no idea that he hadn't been doing this for years. For a moment, it looked like he'd inspired his older brother to give it a shot, but he backed off. He still might come around, but I'm not holding my breath. His younger siblings are very gung-ho about it now and are demanding we do the same for them this weekend, tho. I imagine we'll encounter a few skinned knees and elbows when we try with them, but they'll survive.