Natalie's new bike!

As the weather got warm this spring, we realized that Natalie's knees were getting dangerously close to her chest while riding her bike, and we had the seat up as high as it would possibly go. I had been holding onto a bike given to me by my coworker Yvonne - it used to be her daughter's (who is now in college), but when she gave it to me it was WAY too big for Natalie. Even though it was slightly too small for me, I had been riding it around with the kids.

So, I thought: Why not let Natalie give it a try? We lowered the seat as low as it could go, and while definitely higher than she was used to, she could touch the ground.

 After me staying near her, ready to steady her if needed..she was off!

The bike definitely needs some maintenance (the brakes are quite squeaky!), but overall it's working great. I don't know overly much about using gears (I never had more than a 10 speed bike, and I'm not totally sure that I used the gears "properly" when I was younger), but I know enough to give her the basics. She learned how to change each side, practiced with different gears to see how it changed her ability to pedal, and most importantly, she learned to only change gears while pedaling! Crazy to me that my 9 year old is capable of being on a bike like this - very proud of her!

Bicycling fun

At the end of April I took the kids over to their school one evening to ride bikes. I thought it would be a great place to let them ride around without me having to supervise too heavily...and I was right! Or, almost. I got Natalie set up on her bike, and was helping Henry onto his, when we heard Natalie start crying. Literally 10 seconds after she got on, going around her first turn, she fell off her bike and skinned up her knee, leg, and hand. After rinsing everything off and cleaning up the tears, she was good to keep riding.

I grabbed photos with my iPhone while they were riding around and had some fun editing them afterwards :) 

Henry, meanwhile, is still working on getting off of those training wheels. Not quite there yet, but we are getting closer! 

 

These kids are pretty darn cute together!

 Oh, and I didn't just bring the kids...we also brought Calla with us! I thought she could use some fun and outside air. She wandered around a bit, but not far from the van, and spent much of the time just hanging out in the back, watching everything. Good pup!

Bike riding man!

I have a ton of posts to write (and I seem to keep adding to them each day)...frankly, right now I'm a little overwhelmed by it. And at 9:45 at night, after I just spent an hour backing up hundreds of photos and videos from my phone to my laptop, and organizing them all, I don't quite have the energy to piece together a witty post detailing a bunch of photos from some event.

So, instead, you get a recent video that I just pulled off of my phone: Henry showing off his new bike-riding skills! He's finally gotten enough skill and strength to get up hills, ride over bumps, and go a lot faster. It's about time to take those training wheels off as well, I think!

Christmas Day fun

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, we took the kids out on Christmas afternoon for some fun on their bikes. Henry took a little convincing to try out his new one, but then got much more excited once he realized it was a "big boy" bike. He's actually slightly too small for it, which is great - he'll have lots of time to grow into it!

After some practice, he was off and down the street!

I posted yesterday on my photography blog some Christmas portraits that I took, and I included the photo below. But Henry is so cute, and I love this shot so much, that I included it here again!

 Can't forget a portrait of my gorgeous girl.

Evan got in on the biking fun too. Henry was somewhat confused, but found it amusing...briefly. Then he wanted his bike back!

After the biking, the kids took a nice Christmas afternoon nap (yay for us!), and then we started making dinner. We set out our nice china on the dining room table, and cooked up a Christmas night feast of steak for Evan, shrimp and scallops for the ladies (pictured next to the snowman below), crunchy potatoes, and green beans. I made everything but the steak (with some prep help from Evan on the sides). See, I can cook, even if I don't like to very often. It helps a lot to have had Linda here to occupy the children while Evan and I finished the cooking (and for them to set the table at the same time). Maybe once the kids get a bit larger and don't bug us so much during dinner prep time I will cook more!

Unfortunately dessert didn't get cooked until after dinner (honey almond cheesecake), so we didn't really get dessert that night. That's ok - I've been eating enough! We were all more than happy to eat some the next day, and I sent some home with Linda when she left. 

So, that's our Christmas! Yesterday, our last day home all together without work, we headed back outside for some more biking.

Then lunch and a wonderful 2.5 hour nap from both kids! It was a Boxing Day miracle. We then had a pizza picnic in the living room while watching Despicable Me 2 (the kids got it from Santa - super cute!), and then off to bed to get up normal time this morning, as Evan and I headed back to work. It always ends too soon, but we love to do as much as we can while we have the time off. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Christmas with the Hoffmans

Merry Christmas to all! I hope everyone had a fantastic day, in any way that made you the most happy! We had a fantastic Christmas Eve and Day, which I will detail in a later post, as that involves quite a bit of photo cataloging before I can get them up here! So, instead I will first go through our prelude to Christmas: our weekend with my parents!

My mom had to work last night and tonight, so instead of being here on the actual holiday we celebrated with them over the weekend. They arrived on Saturday, and after settling in and running some errands, we spent the afternoon baking cookies! Natalie was very excited to get to use her apron, and to help us pound the dough and shape it with cookie cutters.

Henry sadly slept through the cookie making, but I had a great time making them with my parents and Natalie!

 

Here's the finished product! We made 3 kinds: sugar cookies (decorated mostly by Dad and Natalie), chocolate with candy cane pieces, and mint chocolate chip

Although Henry missed making the cookies, he certainly enjoyed eating them when he woke up!

 After a home made dinner (we went out on Sunday night), we exchanged Christmas presents with my parents. Natalie's big present was joint between them and my sister, so she had to wait for hers until this morning, but Henry got his big present that night: a big boy bike!

He'd been so great about riding Natalie's old princess bike, which is wonderful, but he deserves his very own and my parents were excited to get this for him (they also got Natalie her first big girl bike). It's 14", which is an unusual size to find. He had fun riding it around the house for a while, including the kitchen. Evan took a video of that and posted it on FB; if you can see it, here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/paradox13?fref=ts.

On Sunday, the weather was nice enough that we could take the new bike outside, which made Henry very excited! We had to adjust the training wheels to make the bike less wobbly, and he was still a bit nervous to ride it in the street, but he did pretty well for his first day out! 

Riding it in the garage seemed to work a bit better, and made him less nervous. 

The bike is definitely bigger than Natalie's old bike, so it will take him some time to get used to it, and grow into it! However, that means this bike will last him a long time, which is great. 

Note: We went out today for a bit, and he did great on his new bike! He's already getting much more used to it. So proud of our big kid!

We thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of our time with my parents: delicious dinner out on Sunday night at FireBirds, seeing the computerized Christmas lights at Edwards Landing afterwards, and a few more solo errands with my mom. I was very sad to see them go, but it's so nice to make these memories!

Now he's got a ticket to ride!

With Natalie now riding her big-girl bike (which I just realized I forgot to post about on here - we got Natalie the next size up bike, a 16" without training wheels), we've got a spare 12" bike with training wheels on our hands. In my previous post, just two weeks ago, I mentioned how well she was doing without training wheels, and her new bike was on the way. Well, it arrived, and she's doing so great on it - zipping around with no training wheels, biking up & down hills, and even went on a 1.6 mile ride with me last night while I ran next to her. She wanted to keep going...I, however, was on my longest straight run yet, so I had to call it quits. Maybe with her next to me I can get up to 2 miles straight!

Anyway, Henry's now almost 3.5, about the age Natalie was when she started to really be able to ride her 12" bike, so I thought it was time that we start teaching Henry how to ride it. He seemed very hesitant at first, both because of the height and (I thought) because it's a girls bike. Turns out that it really just required a few exposures to the bike, because tonight he went right up to it, asking to ride it instead of his toddler bike, and within 10 minutes he was riding around like an old pro! What cracks me up most about these photos is his intense look of concentration. Better that than the alternative of not paying attention, right?!

 I kept having to tell him at first to not look down at his feet, but instead where he's going. He was getting better as time went on, but still tends to look down. I know that will be overcome in time!

 Tongue out = concentration!

 Natalie was so excited for Henry to ride a "big boy" bike (and he seems totally fine with the princess bike - that's my enlightened son!); she loved riding up and down the street with him, showing him how to do turns and navigate. The two of them had a blast.

Of course, I had to capture some movies! Still photos don't quite do it when we're talking about bikes. Here he is towards the start of his bike riding adventure this evening. 

And here is is more towards the end (this was taken almost exactly 10 minutes after the first video). He got good pretty darn quickly!

You can't quite tell at the end of this video, as I didn't pan fast enough, but he makes a "whoosh" noise that is almost a raspberry at me as he drives past. At least, that's how I'm interpreting it - the noise could have been meant to be a lot ruder of a sound. 

Note that we're still working on getting him to back-pedal the breaks to stop; he just wants to put his feet down, which makes me nervous because a) he was wearing crocs tonight (not ideal) and b) his pedals keep going when he's gliding, and one of them is going to rip into his ankle. The braking will come, I'm sure!

More biking fun

Now I get to join in on the biking fun! My colleague gave me her daughter's old bike for Natalie; she was going to donate it, but preferred to give it to me so someone she knows would get use out of it. She thought Natalie would fit onto it in a couple of years, but looking at it, there's no way it would fit her until she's at least into double digits. In fact, I tried it out, and I fit on it rather well! It's not perfect - the distance from the seat to front is a little short for me - but overall it works well, and means that we get to ride together!

Natalie was not very happy that I was riding without a helmet, so that was next on the list to buy. Turns out that the seat on that bike is also far too small for me - I was HURTING the next day! So, we went to Target over the weekend and I got a helmet and new larger seat; so far, it's made all the difference and I can now ride with my girl!

Henry is also getting better at peddling his little bike himself (as I wrote earlier); he has a hard time on hills, mostly because there's not a lot of leverage on that bike. But he's getting stronger and better every time!

Since Evan took these photos of us last week, we've made two purchases: I bought Natalie a new 16" bike (it's on its way here now!) so that she can go even faster and farther. We also bought Evan a mountain/road bike at Target - very basic, but enough that he can go around with the family as well. Once Natalie's new bike is here, the plan is to paint her existing bike and put the training wheels on it so that we can teach Henry how to ride it. I hope by next spring he will be good to go on that bike, and then we can all hit the WO&D trail together!

She's got a ticket to ride!

At the start of the summer, Evan and I decided that it was time to take the training wheels off of Natalie's bike: she was almost outgrowing the bike, her friends could all do it, and she wanted to go faster, faster, faster!...which is hard to do with the training wheels. We were able to work with her for a weekend, but then the weather got insanely hot, and July got very busy, and we didn't take her out for a while. With the gorgeous weather we're having this week, Evan decided yesterday to take her out for more training, and what happened? She got it!

Here she is riding in front of our house.

I was at an office party, and met Evan with the kids in a cul-de-sac near us. It has a great circle around which they can easily ride for practice. Even Henry is getting better on his little tricycle; he's able to peddle it much better without our help!