Mobility

As previously mentioned, Alyssa learned how to ride a two-wheeled bike a few weeks ago. Ever since then, the paradigm of her life has completly shifted.


She is totally obsessed with bikes, bike rides and biking in general. Luckily her passion for biking is shared not only by her parents, but also the neighbor friends next door.


Haydn,Alyssa, Sunny and often Isabel can be found most days, several times a day riding bikes in and around Weatherwood Lane.

They are having the times of their lives despite the frequent falls and knees and elbows that look more like a patch work quilt of scabs and bandaids.

Alyssa ventured into new territory last week when she learned that she could climb the hills in and around her neighborhood. Steve and I didn't think she would have enough strength or stamina to huff and puff up these hills or enough control to get back down. We were wrong though.

On her first attempt she climed right up the hill to the top of the neighborhood with out even stopping for a breath. She came down too with no problem. She was so proud of herself and Steve and I were beyond impressed.

Sunny was pretty happy too, except she realized that she was going to be left behind as the only member of the family not able to roll on two wheels.

Steve insisted that I take Alyssa up the hill to see what she could do. I had been sitting with Sunny in the drive way while the two of them had been exlporing the neighborhood. I took his advice took off up the hill with Alyssa, the both of us on our bikes.

Sunny didn't like that one bit. She mounted her little push bike and came chasing after us. She didn't have a prayer to catch us though and she knew it. I could tell she was upset.

It was really fun to be with Alyssa and see her progress and do difficult things. It was really sad however when we got back home to see Sunny still sobbing at being left behind.

We took her greif and put it to use. We started looking into getting a baby seat on the back of our bikes. We see a lot of people with bike trailers, but that is a very expensive not to mention exhausting option. Those things are like pulling a parachute behind a bike. Up our hills, we just decided not to consider it.

After looking on KSL and checking some local garage sales, we found a little bike seat for Sunny in my brother Randy's garage. We first tried to install it on my mountain bike but found it to be too small to acomodate such a seat. Next we moved to Steve's mountain bike which is a little larger. It worked great!


And we have mobility!

Sunny loved it. She thought it was great! She loved seeing the world from the baby bike seat.

We decided to set off for a day's adventure around Herriman on bikes. Three bikes and a baby seat. We toured Herrimans parks and trail systems. The kids thought it was great seeing trails they never even knew existed practically in their own neighborhood.

I never realized that they didn't know about them. I ride and ran on them regularly, but never with my kids.

We were out for nearly three hours park hopping and trail riding. We even took a bike tour of the school Alyssa will be attending starting in August.

We had a pretty big hill to climb to get back home and for the first time since she learned to ride a bike, Alyssa had finally gotten enough. I ended up carrying her bike up the last hill into our neighborhood. She was a great sport and made it almost the whole way on her own.

We had such a great magical time. It was so fun to be mobile together. We plan to do it again really soon, only this time we're going to bring water bottles. We got really thirsty.