For her 5th birthday we bought Amelie a really cool bike.  It is a 20″ mountain bike actually, and you’re supposed to be 7+ to ride it, according to the manufacturer’s recommendation.  But we took her to the store and since she could straddle the bike and hold it up, we figured it would be OK to start her on it now and let her grow into it.  We thought it would take a while to actually ride the thing by herself though, since it has no training wheels and she had never been able to ride her little bike without them.

Much to our surprise, she started riding it by herself almost immediately.  I practiced with her for about 15 minutes Saturday evening in our cul-de-sac and she rode half way down the street without me holding her.   Mostly she just got scared because she realized I wasn’t holding her.  She was already quite capable.  I thought stopping would be our biggest problem from here on.

The next day, Sunday, we went for a picnic in the park and brought all of our bikes, not really knowing if she’d be able to ride by herself for any distance, as to allow us to ride our bikes.  I did a few practice runs in the grass first, as you’ll see in the following video.  I was amazed, not only how well she rode by herself, and how relatively fearless she was, but mostly how she stopped… used the hand brake, and while doing so hopped off to the side – never dropping the bike!  What an amazing girl our daughter is!

So then I decide, OK, she’s good, let’s go.  She stopped a few times early on because she was nervous about oncoming traffic (just a bike path in the park, with grass on each side… no cars), but after we turned around and headed back, she rode nearly the whole way without stopping!  When I closed my eyes to sleep that night, all I could see was the view from behind her, riding her bike (with helmet and full armor).  I don’t think I could have  been more proud.

Anyway, enough yakin, here’s the video.

[video width="320" height="240"]http://amelie.satoveillon.com/wp-filez/1stBikeRide.wmv[/video]