::bike man::

Kris has been trying to teach Max to ride his bike without training wheels. At first it was a huge ordeal. Max cried and cried. He just wanted his training wheels back!
But then Kris somehow convinced him that it was super duper cool to ride like dad. And so Max gave it a try. Before this trip he's practiced twice, and he's started to really get the hang of it.

There he goes!

Yikes! He's getting good at swerving, that's for sure.

At our dog park they have this long strip of softish pavement that I think is used for long jump or something. It's perfect for Max to practice riding on. Especially since this day we forgot his helmet, jeeps creeps! That's not a mistake we like to make.

Kris is like "Don't forget to USE YOUR BRAKES!" That's Max's biggest challenge. He forgets about his brakes, takes his feet off the pedals and drags them along the ground to stop. It's not very efficient, and makes for some rather spectacular wipe-outs.

Sultan likes to run alongside--or more usually in front.  See him there just barely in the left of the above photo?  That's made for some pretty good wipe-outs too. He likes to make sure Max is ok, but I don't think he understands that he stresses Max out more than otherwise. But that's ok. He's just a nice and silly dog.

But sometimes it's hard to stick with the practicing.

"Um, Max? We're not here to ride up and down this strip by ourselves!"

And whoever else is there usually feels the need to run alongside too--just like Sul. The other day when we had Max out practicing I raced the boy up and down that strip for what felt like hours. Finally I got tired and Max said that I ran out of "juice."
Luckily as Max says, Grandpa NEVER runs out of juice.





Grandpa didn't run out of juice.  He's tough.  Max is having a great time. He's very proud of himself when he can make it all the way down to the end.

It's about right here he starts to get worried. He's trying to remember how to stop.
By the time we left he was stopping pretty well. So well in fact that I didn't even get a picture of a crash. I'm glad he wasn't crashing anymore, but I'm seriously bummed I didn't get any good action shots.

To finish up Kris rode a couple of races against the bike man.

It was a good day for bike riding. Pretty soon he's going to be riding everywhere, all on his own! And we've found a few places around here that are actually conducive to a small cute boy riding around. It's hard, being in the middle of the city, but we're going to make it work.