"Yeah Darlin', Go Make It Happen..."

The weather outside this morning is wet and wintry, and I'm back to feeling as though spring is far, far away.  It's like we'll be packed up and ready to drive to Truro at the end of June, and only then will the tulips finally be in bloom.  

Last week, though, we had a couple of days when the temperatures reached into the sixties.  When we didn't need coats, and when it seemed like as good a time as any to get Rudy pedaling a bike without any training wheels.

We still have the wee purple bike Marley learned to ride on, so I pulled the training wheels back off, and then the chain kept slipping off the gears because I didn't tighten up the hubs enough afterwards.  That slowed us down, but Todd eventually solved the problem, and by the end of the afternoon, Rudy was pedaling on her own for glorious milliseconds at a time before panicking and slamming her foot down for balance.

I think that Marley was envisioning all sorts of spring and summer bike rides with her little sister, because she was my anxious assistant coach that afternoon, riding her bike beside Toot, yelling tips and words of encouragement, while worrying under her breath about potential setbacks and mistakes.  I was speed-shuffling behind Rudy, all hunched over to steer from the back of her seat.  My back was throbbing, and clearly, I need to make more time for exercise.

And I need to make more time for Round Two because Rudy didn't quite master the art of the two-wheeler by the end of the day.  After at least a dozen promising starts, she became distracted by Marley's bike horn, which she decided she needed in order to succeed, and then we lost a lot of time to the Transfer of the Horn.  So now, I'm waiting for the next afternoon when the sun is out and my back is stretched, and maybe Rudy, a girl who was actually Born to Be Wild, will be successful enough to head out on the highway, by which I mean our sweet suburban street, or more ambitiously, the rail trail.