we have "fun"

Ah, summer. It's the time when kids ride their bikes to the park, play until the sun sets, then come home tired and dirty, ready to fall into their beds after a nice bath. Right? At least, that's what I thought would happen.

The reality was much different. The boys did indeed ride their bikes to the park, and they played, and they came home wiped out. That much is true, but it wasn't quite as bucolic as it sounded up there in the first paragraph. Let's start with Liam. The whole way to the park (yes, all block and a half of it) he would ride up ahead, then stop and wait for Max (and me) to catch up. Then he would ride off again...or would have, if he could have figured out that pedaling backward instead of forward merely engages the brakes. This resulted in tantrums at approximately three-minute intervals, complete with yelling, throwing his arms up in frustration, and sometimes even hitting the bike. He got so he had a nice little rhythm: ride, wait, brake, throw fit, repeat.

And then there was Max. To be fair, he's still in the early stages of learning to ride the trike. The trike we have is a Kettler, and some of them come with a parental pushbar, like this one, that allows the adult to help the kid without constantly bending over, saving untold strain on the back. Unfortunately, we didn't shell out the extra dough to get one of those. Instead, I decided to grab a hoe from the garage and wedge it into the bucket on the back of the trike to help with the pushing. That part worked great, and I think Max may even be getting the hang of pedaling now. The part that didn't work so well was the steering. He got his father's penchant for rubber-necking, and the whole way to the park (again, yes, it was a block and a half; but what I haven't told you yet is that it took 30 minutes each way) he was looking anywhere but the sidewalk. Dog behind a fence? Max drives straight into the road. Mailbox spotted? Max veers off into the grass. And so on. Endlessly.

Needless to say, by the time we got home, I was thoroughly frazzled from all of the fit-throwing, bike-hitting, awful-steering shenanigans. That's one "fun" thing that I may never attempt on my own again, or at least, not until they've both mastered the art of bike riding.

(Sorry, no pictures, although I'm sure you all would have loved to have seen the makeshift hoe pushbar.)