Riding a Bike

I am happy to report that Spencer learned to ride his bike completely by himself.  He started.  He stopped. He pedaled and he was happy through it all.  This has been a source of frustration for me for the past year.  I've done a lot of running up the street behind him holding his seat and watching him wobble back and forth only to come crashing down on some lawn.  At one point we got to where he could ride pretty well in a straight line, but he could never get started on his own and his stopping consisted of a sort of jump off the bike when it got slow enough for him.  

A little while ago I was surfing around bicycling.com and I came across the video below.  I decided to give it a try yesterday.  You can actually buy kids bikes that don't have pedals, but I just decided to remove Spencer's pedals (see my previous post on bike tools).  He started out going down with his feet on the ground just like in the video.  After a few runs down the hill he got up the guts to lift up his feet.  We then went to a bigger hill and he made it down fine.  When he mastered the balance we put the pedals back on the bike and he coasted down the hill with a few pedal strokes at the bottom through the grass.  After two more of those rides Spencer decided he wanted to start on the level ground so we went to the paved basketball court and he started up pedaling his first try.  

From start to finish was less than 45 minutes and Spencer was doing figure eights in the parking lot.  I will never run behind another child's bike again.  I really wish we had taken the camera so I could make my own video.  Maybe we'll go back and teach Jessi this week.