A Bigger Bike

My daughter has been riding her bicycle a lot.   She wrote one of the blog posts a few weeks back explaining what it was like in her mind as she rode up and down driveways and on our street.  Mostly what she's doing is riding from our driveway onto the street, to the left to the neighbor's driveway where she turns around, down to the driveway of the neighbor on the other side of us and then back to our driveway.

She does variations on this and has added recently the driveway directly across from us, getting off the seat and with the bicycle inbetween her legs, walking through the natural area to the next driveway and then back up to the street.  She's not going far for the most part, but she's biking miles of distance within the that small area.

She can tell where obstacles are for the most part and hasn't hit her head on a mailbox so far.   We alert her to cars parked on our dead end street that are in the area she bikes and excepting one incident, hasn't run into them.

Today my husband thought brought out her brother's larger, gear-based bike and had her try it.   It was taller with bigger wheels and had gears and hand brakes to get used to.   She was just tall enough to be able to bike reasonably well.   I came outside to find my husband calling out, "hand breaks" every time she got close to an obstacle.

She got it fairly quickly and told him he could stop reminding her noe about the hand brakes.   He said shs might think of asking Santa for a bike if she discocered she preferred his style bike over hers.

The Big Boy Update:  My son wanted to watch YouTube today.  He had been banned by his father for inappropriateness in some of the channel choices he was watching due to language.  Today he has been granted a second chanve.   He also had to fold laundry while watching—without complaining.   So far, so good; he's folding laundry as I write tjis.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  For as much pushback as I get from my daughter, she wants to do the right thing.   Dhruti said I put a lot of expectations om the children, and I would agree, I do.   But there has to be a balance.  It affects my daughter in that she wants to do the right thing.   She seeks approval and validation like everyone else.  My mother told me about a song she made up and was singing while she was visiting my parents in the mountains.   She said while singing, "I wish I could be the perfect daughter."   And while this sounds quaint and charming in its own way, it worries me that I'm not praising and validating her enough.   There are so many things about her that make me proud.  Maybe she doesn't see that because I don't say it enough.   I need to work on it in that case.