Amy can ride a bike now!

[pne]

We decided to get Amy a proper bicycle now.

She wanted a blue one, because blue is her favourite colour. Fair enough. But she also wanted one with dolphins on it! This we couldn't promise.

But. Stella found a blue bicycle with dolphins on it, in Amy's size! So we got her that.

And after only a few days, she could already ride without assistance. (I'm certain that her experience with the balance bicycle helped.)

She needs help getting started (getting on and getting moving), but once she's under way, we can let go. And she still needs to learn to brake properly (using the hand brake or ... what do you call it in English? backpedalling? where pedalling backwards brakes instead. Rücktrittbremse.); right now, she still brakes using her feet, like she had to do with her balance bicycle (or her Bobby car), which had no brakes.

Still! Progress.

And for those of you who would like an image, here you go:

Comments

[yvi]

Wow, she's already very good at this. And she's not even 5, so she's very early in learning that, isn't she?

[pne]

I don't know -- yesterday, there was a girl about Amy's age riding a bicycle quite a bit better than that.

When I talked to her mother, she said that her son had started to ride a bicycle when he was 5 but that her daughter had started learning at 3 -- because when her son was small, they lived in a town and she wanted her son to be more aware of traffic (or at least not bump into cars) before he would learn but later they moved into a tiny village where her daughter could ride around without having to worry about that sort of thing.

So I have no real idea when children typically start learning.

(I don't know when I learned, either, except that it must have been before I was six-and-a-half, because it was before we moved to the house where I spent most of my childhood.)