Good for Gabi!! She'll always remember this day! I can still remember the day my father let go of the back of my first bicycle and I rode it up the street all by myself. Good for Gabi!

Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I can't ride a bike!

Okay, it's not entirely my fault because I had no good place to learn.

The street we lived on had no sidewalks, and was a very busy, winding, two-lane road. We lived on an acre of land, and our house was set way back from the street which meant that we had a long driveway. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough for me to get up any kind of real speed, and it wasn't smooth either. It was -- I forget what they call it (exposed aggregate???), but it was solid (not loose stones), but the stones were raised, so anytime I fell off of my bike (or when I was rollerskating), my legs/arms, etc. were ripped up!

My father tried to teach me to ride on grass; our backyard had a VERY slight incline to it, and he figured that it would be enough to help me build some speed. He removed the training wheels, I got all balanced, and he gave me a solid push. I sped off, gaining speed, and rode directly into a weeping willow tree! That was it...!!!

I did LIKE being on a bike, and wanted to learn how to ride one, but it never quite worked out. The most embarrassing thing is that I would haul my bike out, from time to time, but I swear that I still had training wheels on it until I was nearly twelve (my father put them back on after the tree incident), and it was just too humiliating at that ripe old age to appear on my bike with those things still attached.

Sad, but true...

On the other hand, my older sister used to practically LIVE on her bike when she was growing up, but my sister and parents (I wasn't born yet) lived on a different street back then, and it was flat with little traffic. (Don't even ASK how much grief I took from my older sibling about my inability to ride a bike!)

Fortunately for my own three kids, our house is in a neighborhood with plenty of sidewalks, and plenty of good straight stretches for them to have learned. We live on a corner, facing a street that's too busy for young kids to ride, but the other crossing street leads to two quiet cul-de-sacs. Also, the distance from our corner to our neighbor's driveway is probably about 300 feet, so there was plenty of room for the kids to build up speed when they were first learning.

Well, at least I still had my skates!

Aw, she's so cute!

Moore, it took forever for me to ride a bike when I was a child after my first major incident learning. Mine was similar-I ran smack dab into a tree.

No thank you... I don't think that I want to risk breaking any body parts at this stage of my life. I think that I'll just stick with the bikes that don't go anywhere, like the ones in my club's workout room!