Monday, April 18, 2011

Bike Ride Fail

Lillian on Christmas day, riding her new bike

Lillian likes the idea of riding a bike. She likes to find her shoes and put on her helmet. She proudly rolls her bike down the driveway, and that's mostly where the bonhomie ends. If I actually make her get on her bike, she starts crying. If I coax her to pedal, she starts to scream.

If you ask her what the problem is, she'll tell you any number of things: the wind is blowing too hard, and she's afraid it will blow her over; a car might come and run her over; the garbage truck will come and hit her (this is a surprisingly strong phobia); she'll forget how to break so she can't go very fast; and so forth.

I got tired of the dramatics, so I told her she couldn't ride her bike until she was over it. We waited a few months and on Friday, she begged and begged to go for a ride. We got on shoes and helmet, marched the bike to the end of the driveway. She got on and biked about 3 houses down, then started freaking out. I told her that she just needed to bike down to the for sale sign a few more houses away, and then she could turn around. That done, she got back to her original 3-houses-down-freak-out spot. She got off her bike, crying that she couldn't do it anymore. I told her that she could get back on her bike and take it home, push it home, or we could just leave it there and someone might steal it, but I wasn't going to take it home. Oh the tears. The stamping of the feet. The hysterics.

My neighbor peeked out of his house to see if I was torturing her. She was screaming so much, she wet her pants, which caused more screaming. She cut such a pitiful picture, I took her home and put her in her bed, and I did, in fact, push her bike home.

We tried to give her a "brave necklace" (courtesy my lovely sister-in-law Chantel), and that worked wonders for a while, but it doesn't work for bike riding.

I guess we'll be walking to kindergarten.

2 comments:

Natchel said...

Sucker. She got you to push the bike home. :)
Funny story!

Bridget said...

Ugh, Miriam was like this too. She still kind of is. She's not one of those kids who goes riding off merrily through the neighborhood. It's all very determined and wobbly. I wonder sometimes if there are different kinds of bikes out there and maybe some are really hard to ride and we both bought our kids that kind of bike and every other kid in the neighborhood has the easy kind? Maybe.

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