Western Pennsylvania is not the greatest place in the world to learn to ride a bike. There is no such thing as a flat surface in Western PA, and when you're trying learn the intricacies of balancing, steering, turning and stopping on two wheels, you don't really need the added dimension of doing of all that on a slope.
One way to deal with that is to not use two wheels. Madeline will get there eventually, but for the time being, she's content to ride on three.
It's been bugging me for a while that Jessica was 8 years old and still had her trainnig wheels on. With the trips to Utah, Washington D.C. and Delaware this summer, there's been very little time to focus on learning the two-wheeler. When we got back from Delaware, I decided that I'd have Jessica's training wheels off before her 9th birthday, whether she liked it or not. When Joanne went to Ohio with Jennifer in early August, I took the girls out in the cul-de-sac, removed Jessica's training wheels, and we went back and forth in the street until she got it. When she finally had the balance, she took off and hasn't looked back since. It only took about 20 minutes.
Emily saw the success Jessica had and insisted I take her training wheels off too. I was skeptical, but she was very persistent, and within a half hour, she had it down too. The cul-de-sac got old for the kids after a while, so we headed over to the church parking lot, which is the flattest place I know of around here, and the kids rode for about two hours. They're regular two-wheeler monsters now.We'll see if Madeline can pick it up when she turns five next year. That's still a little young yet, but I put her on a bike with training wheels at Walmart and she took off around the store, so perhaps we'll all be riding bikes very soon.
As for more recent stuff, our Labor Day was very low key. We actually had to work -- classes at W&J started on Labor Day, and then there was a college-wide picnic on campus, complete with the usual suite of inflatable bouncy castles, slides and obstacle courses, so the girls thought it was grand. Everyone's back to school now, Madeline was the last one to start when she went to school for the first time on Wednesday.
Happy fall,
Matt, Joanne & clan
