On Friday night, Jane, her friends and I went on a 20-mile biking trip organized by San Jose Bike Party , along with 3,500 other cyclists, from San Jose downtown to Milpitas (yes, we passed by Cisco’s campus).  At first I did not think I would make it, especially not on my Wal-mart cruiser bike.  Either I would fall apart or the bike would.

Turns out, we (Little Red and myself) both made it out alive!  And I made a few friends

Jane and I lost her friends within the first 2 minutes of biking.  Since we were fighting for our personal spaces among 3,500 other bikers, it was very easy to separate from our group of friends.  We finally caught up to them at the first regroup station, only to lose them again within 3 minutes.  We managed to meet up with them again at the second regroup station… only to lose them once more within 5 minutes, and that is when I said, OK, I am not going to play this catch-up game anymore.  It was important to me to bike at my own pace, to really enjoy the streets at night and focus on this biking experience.

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“I’m going to ask Santa for a motor scooter so that I can keep up with [my brother and sister] when they are riding their bikes. As a mom, I feel like it’s my responsibility to teach various basic life lessons, such as how to swim, how to crack an egg, how to sew a button and how to ride a bike. We have developed workarounds, such as using a tandem bicycle that attaches to my bicycle so that all of us can ride together. She progressed from tricycle to two-wheeler with training wheels to a larger two-wheeler to her current adult-sized cruiser. My middle daughter will never learn to ride a bicycle. My oldest, my 10-year-old, learned to ride a bicycle in the typical fashion. This Christmas, my middle thought she had found the perfect solution to her non-bicycle-riding-ability issue. But she’s getting close to outgrowing the tandem. Then, my middle, eight-year-old daughter came along and we started out on the same path, that is until her brother arrived on the scene.

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