Let's set the scene. It's September of last year, the pandemic is in full swing, and Olive has just turned 3. Recently, she's been rapidly getting both quicker and more proficient on her push-bike. Some of her bigger friends have started showing up on the playground with pedal bikes, and she's expressed some interest. After only a little bit of discussion, Christina and I decide it's time to order a proper pedal-bike for her. We expect it to be ready as an early Christmas present.

Fast-forward. It's late March, and Olive has been inquiring daily about where her bike is. For the last week, we've been able to tell her "They're bringing it here, but it's still far away." Prior to that, all we could say was that they were still making it, and it is super late, and bicycles do take a long time to make, even in a big factory. Finally, though, the big day is here. The bike has arrived, and Olive is super excited. She needs help to get started, but otherwise her push-bike skills have carried over very well and she has no trouble pedaling. We take the bike out for a half hour around the neighborhood; she falls down a few times, but nothing unexpected for day 1 on a bicycle; each time, she just got up and started riding again.

The next day, she refuses to get on. "I can't turn," she says. "I'll fall down and hurt myself!" She begs and pleads to take her push-bike, or her scooter, or even just to walk places in preference to taking her pedal bike. For the next six weeks, she doesn't touch her pedal bike. Out and about, she points out occasional kids in the neighborhood with training wheels on their bikes, and specifically requests them for hers. I'm slowly coming around to the opinion that it would be better to give her training wheels, despite my bicycle-training philosophy, than to have her refuse to ride at all.

On Wednesday, for no reason that I could discern, Olive decided that she was ready to ride again. She just spontaneously told me that she would like to take a ride on her pedal bike, and I was hardly going to say no to that! It was a spectacular success: she rode for 40 minutes with me jogging behind her. When we came home, she was all smiles and confidence, and I was drenched in sweat.

Thursday, the same thing, except I took the adult-sized scooter, and we were both drenched becuase we got caught out when it started to rain. Even so, she rode farther, faster, and more confidently than before, and tackled some mild local hills; the only issue on this ride was that she discovered that she has much more braking power than I do on a scooter, and thought it was hilarious to stop short in front of me. To make up for that, she demonstrated the ability to start from a halt on her own, without assistance.

Today, she asked to go on a ride to someplace new.¹ With each of us on our own bicycle, cruising around beyond the local neighborhood, we discovered a quite nice little skate park an easy ride from home. It was populated by a handful of older kids, probably age 11 or so, who were filming each other doing some fairly impressive² skate tricks for Tiktok.

Olive was fascinated. I explained that this was a playground for riding, and you can ride however you want. She then spent a solid five minutes just standing by the gate, observing. At that point, she decided that she was ready to participate. From then on, all I had to do was watch; she spent over an hour riding on and around and through that skate park on her own³. In the end, I only got her on the road home by mentioning how late it was for dinner, and then giving her a ten-minute countdown.

I can't say for certain at this remove, but I'm pretty sure that it took me a lot more time and practice to get comfortable on a bicycle than Olive has needed. She's still got a long way to go in terms of technique, and I really want to raise her seat height to give her more leverage and a better riding posture, but on the other hand today was still effectively her fourth day on a pedal bike ever. She's picking up skill with quite startling rapidity; I'd be pretty surprised any of the current deficiencies remained by the end of the summer.

When we came home from the ride today, Olive explained the situation to Christina like this: "A long, long time ago, I got my pedal bike but I couldn't turn. Yesterday⁴, I learned how! So today I really had fun!"