The sun came! Of course this meant Daddy had no excuses and finally mowed the lawn. This revealed the lawn as a suitable playground for a day of hooning about and Bea lapped it up. Mostly.
Having worked out how to pedal a bicycle without stabilisers and recently enjoying being ridden about on some dirt motorbikes, I asked her if she would like to learn how to ride a motorbike on her own. She of course jumped at the chance and was almost outside before the question was finished, such was her excitement.
Having managed to calm her down, put on her new elbow and knee pads, plus mitts and helmet from cycling, coupled with some proper motorbike boots, that were once her brothers, we were ready. Unfortunately the little pw50 motorbike had other ideas – I had forgotten to drain the carb at last use (last year) so it refused to fire, so we had to strip the seat off, remove the carburettor and get the crud out of the float bowl – she thought it was all very entertaining, and hearing a four year old say carburettor so clearly will stay with me for a good while. We discussed the explosion of the engine; she was very inquisitive. Eventually the little bike fired and we were ready.
We did a few careful laps with both of us on the bike – yes, it does struggle with my weight on it, but once rolling you can get yourself into trouble, especially given my legs were bent double just staying on the damn thing!
I encouraged her to pull the throttle with me standing behind her, and she did a little bit. What I was most impressed with was her ability to listen and she shut the throttle when approaching a wall, and pulled the brakes; later even instinctively putting a foot down. I managed to let go of her a couple of times, but didn’t linger away from the bike, just in case she pulled the throttle the wrong way. She was doing so well, that when Mummy came out to see, she shouted for Mummy to stop and watch – filled with such excitement she pulled the throttle a little too hard, kept it open and crashed into a low wall. All of the armour she had on worked well. The only injury (mostly shock) was her left thigh that took the weight of the little bike and didn’t have any protection beyond some leggings. She of course cried and with both parents on site in a second, she was scooped up and checked for damage. She was fine, and Daddy even rode off and crashed to show that everyone crashes at some point. She laughed. We were going to be ok.
Later in the afternoon we had another go, and she had lots more confidence, but not enough to yank the throttle wide open. She kept wanting to stop and chat (clearly comfortable being on the bike) – we talked about butterflies and flowers and trees over the noise of the bike ticking over. We even parked the bike on the swing frame and swang ourselves silly whilst continuing to chat freely. In a quiet moment she even asked, “Daddy, what are you thinking about?“!!
Eventually she was taking the corners, and I was nervous of the edges of the lawn and the drop to the patio below, so held on tight. She eventually pulled the throttle too hard and was heading towards a parked spade, not too far from the wall edge, so I yanked the back wheel off the ground to arrest her progress. The spade went over. She laughed and confirmed. “it doesn’t matter Daddy; I’m fine“. Unfortunately I had twinged my back a little and with sweat pouring down my face from all the running around and lifting the back of the bike, was running out of steam. We had one more run where she crashed into a wall, again laughing while I pulled backwards to overcome the forward force of the rear wheel, and that was enough.
I managed to convince her it was time to quit, and decided to pull out the bouncy castle and inflated it much to her delight. The castle is quite quite tired with lots of holes throughout so isn’t efficient and collapses under my weight – Bea is fine on her own though, so spent the next 45minutes clambering round the back, over the integral climbing wall and throwing herself down the slide entry chute.
All in all an amazing day – Mummy took her for a trip to see the lambs in the back field and she stuffed her face really quickly and well at dinner time. She squeezed both Mummy and Daddy intensely hard at bedtime, big kiss and then dropped off straight to sleep exhausted apparently!
Here are a couple of videos of her motorcycling and bouncy castle antics: