Balance

I feel like there are so many posts I could write with this title: Balance. So much of life as a mother and a partner and a professional person is about balancing commitments, priorities, desires, needs, dreams and reality. But this post is about the actual physical act of balance, specifically Zeben's balance.

Zeb first started riding his hand-me-down balance bike in March of 2009, when he was 2 years and 4 months old. At the time he was barely tall enough to sit on the seat properly, and didn't do much riding at all. He'd just walk it around, legs straddling the bike, believing that he was riding it. But by the end of that summer he had grown enough so that he fit the frame well, and he was able to zoom all the way to his preschool from our house (about 1.5 miles). Here is a short video of Zeben riding his balance bike in March of 2010, nearly exactly one year after he first started trying it out:



This summer he has biked to and from town at least a couple dozen times, and I noted that as we walked, his feet were making less and less contact with the sidewalk; he was spending the majority of each ride gliding. A couple of weeks ago when we took Luke and Jaz to buy some new bicycles (bigger, and with gears; they can keep up with their moms on the bike path now!), Zeb fell in love with the tiny 12-inch two-wheeler bicycle in the shop, and we decided to let him get it. I figured he was ready for a real bike, and while he probably could fit on one of Luke and Jaz's newly discarded 16-inch bikes, I knew he'd be more comfortable learning to ride on a smaller one (he is a bit short for his age, still wearing mostly size 2T pants now at 3.5).

We let Zeb ride around in our driveway with the training wheels still on the bike (it came that way) for the first day (he thought it was quite fun), but on day 2, I took the training wheels off. Zeb was not pleased. He did not believe that he'd be able to ride the bike (and he yelled about it so loudly that I'm certain the whole neighborhood heard). I promised him that if he really wanted me to, I would put the training wheels back on after he tried to ride without them. And so he agreed to try. Here he is, 10 minutes later:



Clearly, the balance bike taught him to balance quite well!

"Wow!" I exclaimed, after he'd gone several yards, "you're really riding it!"

"What?" accused Zeb, showing no pride, "you thought I couldn't?"

Oh, my beloved curmudgeon: won't you ever be excited about anything? But the truth is that I think Zeb is a little proud of himself for having learned to ride his bike. Since that day, he's just gotten more and more adept at it, and can now turn circles and everything. I'm so glad for him to be becoming such a confident little bike lover. I don't generally think of him as being a gross motor kind of kid, but this summer he's learned to pump on the swing, and now to ride a pedal bike, and it's great to see him enjoying the physical abilities of his body more. It was also really cool to get to see him go through the full cycle of the balance bike experience; it just makes so much sense! What a fun and stress-free way to learn to ride a bike. I can't wait for Leo to be big enough to start the process (then again, maybe I can; daredevil baby is going to be trouble on wheels!).