Finally

It's been pretty much exactly a year since I first bragged posted that Jack could ride his bike without training wheels.  That boast proved to be premature, because he never progressed further than riding in a straight line on the grass before falling off.  As the months wore on and more and more of his (younger) friends learned to ride their bikes without training wheels, Jack stubbornly refused to try again.  In fact, he decided he didn't want to ride his bike even with the training wheels at all, preferring to ride his Razor scooter instead.

I didn't really mind so much at first, because the Razor scooter also has two wheels.  I figured that he was learning to balance, and he got pretty good at it after awhile.  But here we were, a year later, and it felt like he was one of the last of his friends still needing training wheels.  And he didn't even care.  He didn't want to learn.

His friends' little siblings - some of them as young as three years old - were learning to ride.  I thought that fact would shame motivate him into trying.  Nope.

So I resorted to the big guns: Bribery.

Ever since his triumphant transaction resulting in the acquisition of the Lego dump truck play set, Jack has been thinking longingly of his second choice, The One He Did Not Get.  It was a Lego garbage truck.  He is absolutely happy with his dump truck, but he has always been a little collector.  Once he has one thing, he wants another and another and another.  He was like that with his Thomas trains, with his cars from the Cars movie, with his Angry Bird dolls, and now with these Lego sets.  If I chose to take a half-empty view of this aspect of his personality, I would be distressed by the seeming never-ending grasping for more toys, by the apparent lack of gratitude for what he already has.  But I choose to take a half-full view (at least some of the time) and am glad that there is something that can positively motivate him to do things he wouldn't otherwise want to do.  And, let's face it, I actually buy him very few toys.* It's sort of nice to have an excuse, especially since his birthday is so close to Christmas.

* This is not to say that he has very few toys.  My former living room looks like a toy store exploded, and our backyard looks like a playground.  My kids have a ton of crap.  It just wasn't bought by me.

Anyway, so I told Jack that if he learned to ride his bike, meaning that he starts himself, steers, and uses his brakes to stop, I would buy him the garbage truck (which has since been reworked in his mind to the "recycling truck").  Well, that was all the motivation he needed.  Tom took him to the park this afternoon, and Jack rode five laps around the bike path all by himself.  Tom took some video of this achievement, and at the end of one his loops around, you can hear Jack asking his dad, "Can I get the recycling truck now?"

Yes, Jack, yes, you can.

Next up: swimming, reading, and writing in lower case letters.  He'll have a whole Lego city at the rate he's going.