Being A Bad Mother, Does It Ever End?

Okay, I admit it, I’m a bad mother. My kids still don’t know how to ride a bike. We live on a busy street and our driveway is on an incline and is only one car length long. Not such a safe place for them to ride their bikes. My project this summer was to get them both riding their bikes. My first mistake was to announce this at the dinner table at the beginning of summer, in front of witnesses my family.  Well, that didn’t quite work out like I planned. We had vacation, then lots of rain, then it was too hot and then I had super low thyroid, so low that I could’ve started to lose my hair! My hair people! Does it get any worse than that? We had 2 weeks of summer left and I was determined to get this bike riding business done. I made my husband put the bikes in the back of the truck and we drove down to the gas station to pump up the tires. He had a hard time believing that I didn’t know how to pump up the tires using the air machine thingy, but when we were done, he believed me. I was all gung-ho for the next day to get those kids riding their bikes. Ya, well, that next day was Monday, not just any Monday, no, it was the Monday I had an ovarian cyst burst and I ended up in the hospital emergency room. I was sent home in severe pain with Percocet. So the last two weeks of our summer vacation was spent at various doctor’s offices, having some not so fun tests, a trip back to the ER and more pain meds. No bike riding for us.

Friday afternoon Sissy came home from school and said that next week they were starting a bike riding unit in gym. OH CRAP! Guess what we did this weekend…..try to get Sissy riding her bike. We took the kids to one of the local parks and while J-Man rode his bike up and down the trail with one of us. Every 10 minutes or so we would switch off because 10 minutes with Sissy was about all we could handle. After lots of falling, some tears and yelling that her bike hates her, we went home for lunch.  I promised we would go back afterwards for more torturebike riding. My husband was so exhausted from the whole ordeal he fell asleep in his recliner. Me, I turned to the internet for help. Cuz, really, where else would you look for advice on how to teach your child to ride a bike? I showed her a Youtube movie of a little girl falling off riding her bike the same way Sissy was.  The half-hearted pedal then fall move. Then another video showed a clinic in NY city where the first thing they do is take the pedals off of the bikes and just teach the kids to glide getting used to balancing on the bike before they start pedaling. This looked like a pretty good idea to both of us. We got the bike and brought it into the back yard where there’s a little incline and she practiced and practiced gliding down that hill. She actually started to enjoy it and was balancing pretty well. That’s where we are right now. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t have gym until Tuesday so we have one more afternoon to turn her into a bike rider. Wish us luck because we’re so gonna need it.