Bicycle! Bicycle!

My daughter Finn is eight. I know I've told you all this before, but have I told you that she is eight and she can't ride a bike? As the weather gets warmer bike season looms. I tried to teach her last summer. It did not go well. I am impatient and she is so over-the-top cautious that it's almost laughable... if you're not the one hunched over tiny handlebars, pushing a 60 pound child, that is.

She is tall for her age and insists on training wheels. My dad had to customize her bike to accomodate the extra wheels. Kind of like "Pimp My Ride" but totally uncool. She pedals so slowly that small pebbles actually send her sprawling due to lack of momentum. She howls and cries and screams up and down the street. People look at me like I'm a bad mother - just because I walk a little bit ahead of her and kind of, sort of try to look like I'm just out for a stroll and not with the wailing nightmare on wheels trailng a half-block behind me.

This whole bike-riding thing makes me a bad mother. You know at the end of one particularly bad "session" I actually threatened the poor child? I told her that if she didn't at least try to pedal down the block that I would give her bike to her 2nd grade nemesis, Kiana. I got really into it, embellishing my plan with gusto. I would invite Kiana over for grilled cheese sandwiches (Finn's favourite food) and then bring out the bike. I would hand it over to her and let her know that it is hers for the taking since Finn couldn't even be bothered to try to ride it. I am a monster. But she pedaled that bloody bike half-way down the block - until she encountered a hair-line crack in the cement. Game over.

So, yeah, summer's coming. My darling little contrarian has set her sights on a cool banana-seat bike she spied in a bike shop window. She wants streamers on the handle bars and a bell. I will buy it for her, because every kid should get excited about a new bike. And maybe this year she will figure it out. Maybe I will be able to teach her instead of terrorizing her. And we'll go on long rides together around the seawall - me looking over my shoulder smiling benignly and she grinning adoringly up at me, skinny little legs pumping, the wind in her hair (the little bits that stick out of her helmet, of course) ... Or, you know, maybe Big Sisters covers this sort of thing...