Radio Flyer

Beth Ann Bayus takes us through her journey to two wheels.

My daughter can do many things. Ride a bike isn’t one of them. In fact, even thinking about riding a bike isn’t one of them.

Tried as we have during the last two years to get her to ride one of three (yes, three!) Radio Flyer vehicles parked in our garage, a tiny sit scooter, a mini car and later, a quintessential http://www.radioflyer.com/products/trikes/33.aspe, complete with wooden blocks duct-taped to the pedals that her grandparents bought for her second birthday), she shows no interest whatsoever in anything cycling-related.

Sure, she may sit on the Radio Flyer Little Red Roadster…to read a book. Or sometimes I’ve caught her loading Joe Pa Bunny, Snip The Cat and her stuffed fish Gill on the trike’s back step deck…to read to them. But I’ve never witnessed her actually climb on, sit on the seat, grab the streamer-laden handle bars, ring the bell and pedal the thing…anywhere. It simply has never happened.

And it’s not for lack of trying on our part. “Sit on the seat and I’ll push you,” is met with a polite, “No thank you, Mumma!” “Just see if you can reach the pedals,” gets a “No, I don’t want to, Mumma!,” followed by a sprint in any direction other than the bike.

Even a little peer pressure from the neighborhood tots whizzing around the circle of our court on their own pedal cars, tricycles and two-wheelers can’t entice her to try her hand at bicycular movement. She just runs through the pint-sized traffic using her own perfectly good two feet, never caring to feel the buoyancy of black rubber meeting crusty concrete.

She did once, during such an excursion into our court’s rotary, actually stop to touch one of the older kids’ scoot bikes (picture Fred Flintstone’s bike, powered by feet on the ground rather than on pedals, or check out YouTube’s demo. leaving the door open for what I thought would be an opportunity to expand her horizons into the world of self-propulsion. Alas, it was a fleeting interest brought on more from a desire to examine the sparkly paint, followed closely by a request to sit on the front porch… and read a book.

The significance of the incident wasn’t lost on me, however, and as soon as I got a second to logon, I was searching the Internet for a scoot balance bike, thinking it a perfect present for her three-year birthday. The search was rather confusing on several fronts, I’m afraid.

For instance, it appeared from my research that the original scoot bikes were made out of wood and originated in Europe (they think of everything there, don’t they?!). The theory is that kids learn to balance themselves faster when they propel a bike by pushing with their feet on the ground, rather than pedaling, and forgo the need for training wheels later on when they switch to bikes with the customary pedal mechanism. Made sense to me, and if the neighborhood kids were any proof, the idea had merit.

The conceptual problem for me, therefore, wasn’t with the sans-pedal design, but rather with the wooden construction. Why on earth would anyone ever make a bike out of wood, knowing full-well that it was sure to be left outside on a front lawn in the rain about a million times before the kid outgrew it? Not all the lacquer in the world could prevent the resulting wheel warp!

So my search narrowed to those models with metal structures. A little bit of on-line voyeurism in the plethora of scoot bike reviews revealed consistently high marks for a brand called “Kettler,” so my next step was to contact all the local bike shops to see if we could test out a showroom model. Confusing part number two: no one sold them, Kettler brand or otherwise! Sure, one place said they’d heard of scoot bikes and could maybe special order one, but they really didn’t know too much about them. What was I missing here? Why wouldn’t a bike shop want to sell these things, given their obvious popularity? Was it because of some hidden danger or because they’re not traditional “purist” bikes? Why didn’t the stores realize the potential for an added sale here, especially in these tough economic times? Honestly, my whole goal was to just try some alternatives to get my kid on anything remotely resembling a bike and avoid paying shipping in the process, but it’s not as if I (or any of the thousands of other parents of bike-age children just like me) wasn’t going to eventually buy my daughter a “real” bike with pedals, so why wouldn’t retailers use the scoots as “entry bikes” and guarantee themselves a future sale in the process? I’m still mystified.

Regardless, there I found myself, on-line comparison shopping (a task I abhor) for the Kettler Balance Bike, a search that ended with the Sprint Princess model on sale at Amazon for $77. Anyone who knows me knows how crazy I was about getting my daughter a pink (shudder) princess bike, complete with (double shudder) a little gold crown fender ornament, but for $32 less than the $110 Frog or Flames versions, I could make myself pretend that the choice was intentional when asked by all the other moms around the circle, couldn’t I?

So the big day finally arrived, and we wheeled out the Kettler Sprint Princess in all its pastel glory, snapping pictures and shooting video, hoping to capture my daughter’s glee over the newest bike in her arsenal, only to be met with a refusal to even look at it. Done. Over before we even started. I think we did manage to get one shot of her in the vicinity of it, which is probably the best we could hope for (and pure justification for my decision to save 32 bucks and forgo the $110 Frog version).

In retrospect, I’m not sure who I was trying to please: myself or my daughter. I knew she wouldn’t get near that bike—scoot, balance, Princess, Frog or otherwise. And I’m even less sure of exactly why I wanted to provide her the means to be able to flee from me so quickly, anyway. Why would I ever want her to be able to get away from me faster than I could possibly ever catch her? That’s what’s most confusing to me. But maybe it’s because I want her to know the feeling of looking back over her shoulder someday, realizing there’s no one there holding her up, and instead, know what it’s like to be truly propelling herself, on her own, for the first time in her life. Maybe because as much as I want to keep her near me forever, it’s not as strong a feeling as wanting her to experience that precious word “freedom,” blonde hair trailing abreeze behind her…

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