Katy Takes to the Bike

Andy returned from his trip to the UK late on Thursday night (just over a week ago) and on Friday morning I was off to the annual 3 day ultrasound conference. Unfortunately I didn't actually get to go anywhere exciting as the conference was in Canberra. Also due to my own doing I didn't see any of the conference as I had volunteered myself to organise the 4 workshop rooms which involved sourcing 50 patients and 13 students as well as keeping the presenters happy. Anyhow this meant that I was absent from home for the whole weekend and Andy was able to have some much needed catch up playtime with the girls.

With all weekend to kill, Andy decided to walk the dog to the shops with the girls riding their bikes. Katy hasn't spent much time on her balance bike so her riding technique is yet to be mastered. At first Katy was walking her bike along with legs astride. This progressed to occasionally sitting down on the seat and rolling a wee bit. The round trip to the shops took just 2hours which is about 30mins per 400m!!

With this new found enthusiasm for riding I encouraged Katy to ride her bike to pick up Ella from preschool. We left with 50mins spare and the pram (in case of a meltdown) with Ella's bike strapped in. I was worried when it took us 10mins to go about 200m however soon after that, Katy managed to get the feel of alternate leg pushing/rolling and we sped up before stopping this time to look at flowers or leaves or cars or.....

Preschool is 1.4km from our house with a large hill in between. Katy ended up walking up the hill while I carried her bike and once over the traffic lights she increased her pace and we arrived at preschool just on time. Ella was excited that we'd brought her bike and was happy to ride off in front and return back to us every so often. Katy with Ella's encouragement had begun to roll for longer periods with both feet up. This was short lived though - her tiredness set in on the way home, so she decided she'd had enough riding for one day and happily climbed into the pram for the trip home via the shops. So the normal 20mins round trip took us also just over 2 hours!