For over a year, Avery has been riding her WOOM 1 Balance Bike (aka Rocket) as her number one choice for getting around the neighborhood. As expected, it was a bit of a slow start as she got used to riding on two wheels. She’s never had or used training wheels, so you can only expect it to take some time. Here she is on her first riding session….
Surprisingly, she caught on fast as noted by her increase in speed and confidence in weaving left and right. She’s even displayed her skills at the local skate park.
Maybe it’s a biased parent thing, but I’d say she’s pretty good with her WOOM Balance Bike. Of course she still has her falls, usually from something like a construction truck catching her eye while she’s riding, but overall, watching her on the WOOM has give us nothing short of numerous #ProudParent moments. Including things like conquering a steep downslope even though she fell a few times before that.
I give some credit to using the song “Get Back Up Again” from the Trolls soundtrack. Her WOOM balance bike has even helped her learn how to share and get along with friends.
Any parent probably thinks about how their child develops socially, especially one that stays home with their kid instead of taking them to daycare/school, so seeing this puts a giant grin on my face! Now it’s time for the next step up in learning to ride a bike….pedals!
As fans of WOOM Bikes in our house, the choice for her next, pedaled, bike, is the WOOM 2. The super generous folks at the WOOM Bikes USA headquarters in Austin, TX happened to enjoy my posts with Avery riding their top-of-line balance bike and have agreed to send her a WOOM 2 to ride!
WOOM Bikes has provided the WOOM 2 and accessories free of charge in exchange for my documentation of the transition from a balance bike to a pedaled bike. The plan is never relying on training wheels along the way, but some of her friends do have bikes with training wheels that she will ride as a part of them sharing so well.
I’d like to eventually have a weekly gathering of kids to ride their bikes in a safe place as parents join to encourage keeping active, sharing, and having fun. Hopefully we’ll be able to pry Avery off her new ride to share with other friends if they happen to want to test it out. At first, Daddy will be lucky to ride!
But before we give her the Rocket replacement, she has to earn it. Since we don’t want her thinking she just gets nice things for no reason, she must ride 10 miles on her WOOM 1 and maintain good control while doing so. Negative miles for times when she misbehaves. She’s almost at 5 miles as I write this, and so far we have a sweet kid besides the “freebie” upsets no toddler can escape.
I’m excited to start this journey to riding a pedaled bike, and extremely grateful to WOOM for allowing me the opportunity to share their high quality bikes for kids. My blogging time has gone down dramatically as I focus more on my family and playing with Avery, but keep an eye out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in between my posts to see how Avery is doing with her WOOM 2.
This one will be purple, any suggestions on a new nickname?
