The Need for Speed

Behold what has happened over the last two weeks:


Our little girl is now riding her bike sans training wheels.  The picture above is from the first day she did it on her own bike (previous success was riding the neighbors tiny bike with flat tires...gave her better balance).  I was actually in the back yard weeding at the time and Papa Coberly was helping her.  I walked over to the side of the house at some point and caught a glimpse of her zooming down the street.  I was shocked, was that my child?????  Sure enough it was and boy was she proud of herself.  I'm impressed just because I remember being much older before I was able to ride a bike without training wheels.  Maybe those banana seat bikes we had were harder to balance...yeah, that's it.

Of course the first big lesson learned was that while speed can be fun, too much of anything is bad.  She took a big digger the next day resulting in too skinned knees, scraped chin, slightly (not noticable) chipped tooth, busted lip, and a scraped arm.  Thankfully I was inside the house at the time, Ted witnessed the accident.  He said that by the time he got the words "too fast" out of his mouth it was too late.  It scared her pretty good and she was a crying mess for a few hours ("I can't believe this happened to me!").  Ted and I both showed her the scars on our knees from various scrapes and falls as kids. Explained that it was a right of passage.  And to her credit, she was back up and riding that evening. Two weeks later and she's only improved in her confidence.  I think her real motivation was to keep up with the other kids in the neighborhood.  Let's face it, training wheels slow you down and Katherine won't let anything slow her down.