Balance, balance, use your balance..

(If you haven't checked in recently, be sure to scroll down for more entries, including pictures from our trip to the reptile zoo!)

Jo-jo's circus, anyone? Nevermind.

Since we had spent Saturday split up and scattered to the far reaches of the greater Seattle area, we decided to spend Sunday altogether as a family. With the weather still being nice, and with A. having celebrated a fifth bday this month (and already having demonstrated some decent balancing skills), I suggested we take the training wheels off of his bike. I packed up a picnic lunch, we loaded the kids' bikes into the van, and headed over to Farrel-McWhirter park in Redmond. It's the same location N. learned to ride without training wheels a couple years ago - there's an area with a nice, gradual slope, and a dirt/gravel/grass surface that's less painful to crash on (always important). Here's the play-by-play in pictures:

Kids hopping on their bikes.


Daddy gets boy-boy steady.


Daddy helps get him going.


Mommy takes over (I didn't get a picture of the first time A. took off on his own - it ended in a crash that I could hear from around a bend in the path, and it took some convincing to get him to hop back on for another go).


And he's off!


He was pretty exhausted after this, so the kids went off into the woods, first with Daddy,



and then on their own. They were out there alone for 30 minutes or so - not terribly long, but it felt like an adventure to them. Hubby and I figure it's good for them to have some unsupervised kid-time in the woods, and we could hear them every once in a while, so we knew they were safe. When they returned, they wanted to take us on their "path" - they had tried to see how far they could go only walking on fallen logs.



This is me, trying to cross a log over a stream crossing. The kids naturally scrambled over this with no problem, even N. who tends to get anxious about these things. Of course hubby was over like a shot, having grown up with this stuff. But not me. I'm clinging to these poor little branches for dear life. In spite of that, I nearly tripped over an itty-bitty little nub of a branch near my left foot. Why is it that two feet suddenly seems so high when it's over water? Hubby reminded me that the creek is so low I'd likely only get my feet wet, but I explained that it wasn't wet shoes, or bodily injury I was worried about - more the wounded pride I was anticipating. If nothing else, the kids were getting a kick out of watching me try to cross this toothpick of a log suspended over a roaring rapids.


Hubby is lucky that I have a sense of humor. Here's me making it back to solid land. What a relief. The kids made the daddy stick close to me for the rest of the hike to help out the poor mommy. After 15+ years of traipsing through the woods, I still retain the balance of a drunk sailor. Hopefully the kids will take after their father!