Two wheels

Joe can ride a two wheeler now!  The training wheels are off! Grammie and Granddad came to visit us.  We had a great time at parks and goofing off at home.  One day we went for a walk around the track.  I’ve been wanting Joe to learn without his training wheels all summer, but never got around to it.  Well, today was the day!

Someone gave us a little razor scooter earlier this summer, and we noticed that Joe could balance that just fine.  When I first took the training wheels off, Joe got on the bike and immediately rode to the end of the driveway completely unassisted.  Even at the end, he managed to stabilize himself without a major tumble when he came to a stop. After that, he sailed down the street.  All by himself.  It’s like he had been chained down by his extra wheels, and when we took them off, he was FREE!

There was something about this ride that made me feel like we should have tried it sooner – he was obviously more than ready.  In a way, that’s how I felt about his reading.  We worked on it for a few months every night last winter, but never very hard.  Then one day, he just took off.  If he didn’t know a word, he guessed or would sound it out, but he read with relative ease.  We hadn’t even gotten through most of the rules – we had just started with ‘silent e’ which is really the first of the semi-complicated phonics rules.  I was kind of proud of myself to teaching him how to read, but truth be told, he kind of did it himself.

Also, on this visit with Grammie and Granddad, we all went out to eat at Cracker Barrel.  Delish!  On the way home, we stopped off at a park the boys like only to discover that the splash pad was already turned on.  Even though the boys didn’t have any swim gear, we played anyway.  Andrew was just in his diaper and we were all watching him from behind giggling about how bloated it had gotten in the water.  Not five seconds later, another mom there, obviously annoyed, told me that my son had “poopies in his diaper and it’s running all down his leg”  So nasty!  None of us had noticed!  So, yeah, I’m that trashy mom that lets her kids play in the water improperly dressed.  Big deal.  The kids had a blast.

Andrew and Granddad at the park.