Biking

We took Jaydon to a nearby park for his first bike ride on June 7th (see above). We thought the tennis court was a good place to start. He got a kick out of riding around, but couldn't figure out how to put pressure on the pedals to get it moving on his own. The biking didn't last too long before we were off to the playground instead.

Since then, Jaydon has been on his bike many times more. He's figured out how to pedal on his own, even up a slight incline. Most of his biking is on our driveway which slopes up from our garage doors. We park our cars up slope and open up our garage doors which makes for a nice area for doing loops.

This video and picture were taken on July 13, 2009.

We were happy to receive the bike Jay's riding in the pictures above from friends of ours. It was a bike they had picked up from their town dump (yay for re-using!). Their daughter had received a hand me down bike from her cousins, so the dump bike was no longer needed. The dump bike is a perfectly good bike...other than the fact that the brakes don't work. It was good as a learning bike, but it became clear to us that Jaydon needed a bike with working brakes when he started gliding backwards and pedaling backwards just for fun - not a good habit to get into.

So off we went to a bike shop...looking for a good used bike. The bike store we visited came well recommended and we were all excited. I was disappointed when we arrived, however, because the only used bike that fit Jaydon was a Spiderman bike. I'm so anti-mass marketing media stuff that we might have walked away without anything that day, but Brian brought common sense to the situation. It was a perfectly good bike, Spiderman or not, and we didn't have the time to go trapsing around Connecticut in the hopes of finding something better (not Spiderman).

So here he is - Jaydon riding his new bike and loving every minute of it. The video and picture below were taken today.

We also got Jay a nice sounding bell to go with his bike. Now where is that video I took of him ringing it. He loves ringing the bell while he's riding along, and I love it, too!