by Julie Weir

From the minute you put your child onto their first bike you know there will come a time when the training wheels will have to come off.

You know this, yet you don’t realize how quickly that day will sneak up on you.

Suddenly, last week, this day was upon us. We decided that we would take the training wheels off my daughters bike and my son’s bike (4.5 years old, came out of the womb able to do somersaults, self-proclaimed king of the world) at the same time. “Why go through this twice?”, was the thought.

As we loaded the bikes in the van to drive to the nearest bike trail (no way were our kids going learn to ride on the Indy-500 in front of our house) I could feel my stomach cramping. They were going to fall, whine, cry, sniffle, whine some more, and then bleed. My daughter was likely never going to get on a bike again. I thought about hiding the bikes and detouring to an ice cream store in a wildly evasive manoeuvrings.

I suddenly realized I was holding my breath and starting to squirm.

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