Ty’s Weblog

We’ve gotten Xander and Mira new bicycles this weekend. And what a weekend it was.

Xander has a thing at his school this week on bike safety, and they are doing a big bike-a-thon on Friday. We decided that his tricycle was too small for him and it was time to move up to a bike. Mira wanted one too, so we figured we’d just go ahead and get them both one then.

Saturday morning we headed out to Target to look at bikes. We found one for each of them, but they were all boxed up, no way to try them out at the store. We read everything on them though, and they seemed to be the right size. We put those in the cart and started looking at helmets.

Helemts are nontrivial. We spent quite a while looking at different ones and trying to figure out what did and didn’t fit. We finally gave up. We decided to go get some lunch and then try and find a bike shop in town to get help with the helments. We put the bikes back on the shelf for now, since we can’t use them without helmets anyway.

On the way to lunch, we passed a bike shop, so we decided to head back to it after lunch. Turns out it was a good thing we did. The bike shop was hosting a free bike saftey class done by the police department. Part of the class was a fitting for a helmet, and you get to keep the helment for free. So we lucked into a $70 windfall there and the kids got a quick bike safety class out of it.

After that we headed back to Target and picked up the bikes we’d decided on earlier.

Move ahead to Saturday night. We get the kids in bed and move the bike boxes into the family room so we can put them together. We open up Xander’s first. I start reading the instructions and realize that this bike has a hand brake. It had never occured to me that bikes for that age would even have that as an option. We talk about it and decide that pedal brakes are going to be a lot easier to learn on and that a hand brake really takes a lot of work to use. So that goes back in the box to be returned.

Xander wasn’t asleep yet, so we called him downstairs to tell him about what we have found and the decision we’ve made, so we won’t be upset in the morning when his bike isn’t put together like we’d promissed. He was very understanding about it. We told him we’d wait and not put Mira’s together either since we couldn’t do his tonight. He told us to go ahead and put Mira’s togehter and he’d just ride his tricycle in the morning when they got up, because he didn’t want her to have to wait. I was amazed. I admit that sometimes I worry that we’re making mistakes with him, but then he does something like that. I figure any kid who at 6 years old can put his little sister before himself like that can’t turn out too bad in the end.

Anyway, we send Xander back up to bed and start getting Mira’s bike out. I’m thinking, “This should be no problem, it says right on the box, 5 easy steps.” I’d like to point out to the bike makers that it’s not really 5 easy steps when each step has parts a through f. That’s really 30 steps. In any case, I made it though “step 1″ pretty easily. Step 2 was a show stopper though. Before I’d started, I’d made sure I had the tools that the instructions said I’d need. One of those was a 6″ adjustable wrench. I had a 8″ adjustable wrench, so all should be good. The 8″ wrench couldn’t expand far enough to turn the bolt for step 2. Wonderful. So that has to wait till I can get a bigger wrench. Back in the box.

At this point, I call up my Dad to find out exactly how anyone after René had gotten a bike. He said that pretty much, after the first try, he bought them put together. Hey, that’s an idea!

So Sunday morning we head out to look for bikes again. First try is Wal-Mart. No real luck there. They didn’t really have anything that was the right size for Xander in stock.

So we head out to Sterling to the ToysRUs there. After some poking around we find two good bikes for them. It turns out that the instructions on the box for assembling the bikes are wrong. What you really need to assemble two bicycles it a pair of $10 bills. After some work with the associates in the store, we convince them to let us take two of the ones up on the shelf that are already put together, instead of coming back in two days to pick up one that they have freshly put together. A little more work convinces them to go open a new box up to get us the instructions for the bike that is missing them.

We go eat then and come home. The kids have a short quiet time so we can rest a little bit and then we head outside. The kids had a great time on the new bikes. Xander did a great job on his. I think he’ll be ready to get rid of the training wheels before too much longer. Mira still has some learning to do about how to use the peddles, but she had a good time also. It was a lot of fun watching them ride their new bikes and well worth the effort that was involved.