Elliot rides a bike & Loses a Tooth

 I've been trying to persuade Elliot to ride a bike for about 3 years now. We tried bribery. We tried peer pressure. What finally worked was seeing Annie zip around on her strider bike. He couldn't stand for that! As soon as he expressed a slight willingness to learn, I borrowed a bike from the Sevey's and made a sticker chart. Riding the bike around the gym when we were there for volleyball/playgroup would earn him screen time. Then there were four challenges at the end for increasingly long routes around our neighborhood. 

I can't give Elliot too much shade for his bike avoidance since I learned just a month before him. I made it 3 decades without learning how to ride a bike. My mom got hit by a car while riding a bike when she was 16 and spent a year in a wheelchair, so there is some understandable bike trauma there. My siblings all learned somewhat at scouts or neighbor's houses, but I never got on a bike until my college roommates pushed me around the Helaman Halls parking lot. It was terrifying. I went on a bike ride with 9 year old Blake that summer. He left me in his dust while I crashed into various rocks and then walked the bike home. Aaron got me on one once, but I never got past the point where I was in constant panic mode- until this year! My friend Bethany Mulder gave me her old bike before she moved away and gave me some lessons. She deserves a sainthood for her patience. Now I can ride and I love it! 

We learned in the church gym. He didn't have training wheels. At first I would hold/push him back and forth while he got used to peddling. Then I would let go for the middle part before helping him stop at the end. Then he was able to ride and stop by himself after an initial push. Then a few sessions later he was zooming around all by himself while my heart did these little pride explosions. 

The grand prize was for riding his bike all the way to Stanley the rock snake and back, which is a little over a mile. Wild Katz proved to be well worth his efforts! 

One of the few pictures I got of Elliot at Wild Katz- he was running all over the place exploring while I kind of kept up with the littler kids.

Isaac absolutely did not know what to do with this clear floor panel on the upper level of the jungle gym thing and it cracked me up.

In other news, Elliot lost his first tooth! It got loose when he was eating a burrito on our campout and fell out a week or so later when he was eating some cantaloupe. He instructed me to document the food related details of this experience for the blog, so here it is folks!